Part 2

Diana took us into a conference room normally used for settlement negotiations. Grant’s attorney arrived two minutes later, angry about the delay until he saw the deed. Then he stopped speaking and began reading every page from the bottom upward.

Paige explained the closing without embellishment. Six weeks earlier, Grant had contacted Meridian Title as the manager of Foster Residential Holdings. He said his wife owned Alder Street but had relocated temporarily to Portugal. He supplied a scanned passport, a utility bill, our marriage certificate, and an authorization allowing him to negotiate. The purchaser was Bellweather Urban Partners, a small investment company represented by a bank. The price was six hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

“Where did the money go?” Diana asked.

Paige turned to the disbursement page. “After taxes and closing costs, six hundred and forty-one thousand, eight hundred and twelve dollars went to an account in the name of Foster Residential Holdings.”

I had never heard of that company.

Grant leaned back. “It is a temporary family entity. Lena benefited from it.”

“Show me one transfer to her,” Diana said.

Grant’s lawyer placed a hand on his sleeve. “Do not answer until we review the account.”

That silence answered enough.

Paige described the remote verification call. The woman on screen knew the property address, my aunt’s name, the year the kitchen was renovated, and the color of the upstairs bathroom tile. She wore my navy coat, the same one hanging on my shoulders now. Paige had asked her to tilt the passport beside her face. The connection froze twice. Grant joined the call from another room and blamed hotel internet.

“Did she speak freely?” Diana asked.

Paige considered the question. “She answered. But Mr. Foster repeated two questions before she did.”

I remembered Grant borrowing my old passport months earlier. He said our accountant needed identification to correct a tax record. I remembered the navy coat disappearing from the hall closet and returning in a dry-cleaning bag I had not paid for. At the time, each detail had been too small to carry suspicion. Together, they formed a path.

The judge agreed to postpone the divorce hearing for forty-eight hours and issued a temporary order preventing further transfers from the holding company. Bellweather’s bank was notified that title was disputed. No one accused Paige of participating in the fraud, but she looked ashamed anyway.

Outside the room, she told me the buyer had planned to renovate the townhouse into executive rentals. “They believed it was vacant,” she said. “Mr. Foster gave us photographs of empty rooms.”

The house was not vacant. My aunt’s furniture remained upstairs, covered in sheets while I decided whether to make it my office. The photographs must have been taken during the two days Grant arranged for a cleaning crew.

My phone rang. It was the caretaker from Alder Street.

“Lena,” he said, “a moving truck is parked at the curb. They have an inventory with Grant’s signature.”

I looked through the glass wall at my husband. He was not surprised.

The sale had been discovered, but his deadline had not passed yet.