Chương 6
Amy took the phone from his hand before he could press the final digit.
“What are you going to say?”
“That they stole our house.”
“They’re lawyers.”
“I know what they are.”
“You sound like Teresa.”
The comparison hit hard enough that he stepped back.
Amy placed the phone on the table.
“We have an attorney now. Let her answer.”
Their lawyer was recommended by the hospital’s family advocate. Dana Brooks had a narrow office above a pharmacy and a habit of removing her glasses whenever someone used the phrase simple solution.
“There is no simple solution,” she told them during their first meeting. “The recorded transfer can be challenged, but the lender will protect its lien. The criminal investigation helps, but it doesn’t automatically resolve title. Your mother’s power of attorney creates ambiguity.”
“It doesn’t authorize theft,” Connor said.
“No. It may give the lender arguments about good-faith reliance.”
Amy sat with her hands folded in her lap.
“What happens to the house?”
Dana removed her glasses.
“No one should sell it while this is disputed. We’ll seek an order preventing transfer or foreclosure. Eventually, a court may void the deed and decide what happens to the loan.”
“Eventually?” Connor asked.
“Months. Possibly longer.”
“We can’t live in a rental for years.”
Dana looked at him.
“You can live in a rental. You don’t want to.”
Connor glanced at Amy.
Dana continued. “You should also prepare for your mother to separate the property dispute from the family conduct. Her attorney will say the birthday incident was emotional, unrelated, and exaggerated after the arrest.”
“It was recorded,” Connor said.
“Part of it was recorded. The recording supports you. It doesn’t prove every allegation.”
Amy’s shoulders drew inward.
Dana turned toward her.
“You don’t have to prove your entire marriage to litigate a deed.”
“It isn’t my marriage I’d be proving.”
“No,” Dana said. “But people will make it one.”
They filed for a temporary injunction.
Teresa filed a response three days later.
She claimed Connor had agreed to transfer the house to protect it from liability connected to his construction work. She claimed Amy had known about the plan and later denied it after developing “irrational hostility” toward the Bradley family. She described herself as Frederick’s primary daytime caregiver.
Amy read that sentence at the rental kitchen table.
Her face did not change.
Connor reached for the papers. “Stop reading.”
She held them away.
“She says she raised him.”
“She didn’t.”
“She says I was often unable to provide appropriate care because of anxiety and exhaustion.”
“You were exhausted because she—”
Amy dropped the pages.
“Don’t finish that sentence like it makes you less involved.”
Frederick banged a plastic spoon against his high-chair tray. The noise was cheerful and repetitive.
Connor sat down.
Amy pushed the response toward him.
“She has text messages.”
The filing included screenshots. In one, Amy had written, I can’t do this today. Please take him.
In another: I feel like I’m disappearing.
Teresa’s replies were warm.
Of course, sweetheart. I’m always here.
Rest. I’ll handle everything.
Connor had never seen those messages.
“They make her look kind,” Amy said.
“They’re incomplete.”
“They’re real.”
“She caused the problem and then documented herself fixing it.”
“Yes.”
Connor leaned closer. “Do you have the rest?”
Amy laughed once without humor.
“She took my phone in April and said the battery had swollen. She replaced it.”
“Were the messages backed up?”
“I don’t know.”
Connor stood.
“Where’s the old phone?”
“I don’t know.”
He paced once across the kitchen, then stopped when Amy flinched.
“Sorry.”
She looked toward Frederick.
“Every time you get angry now, you aim it away from me and expect that to feel safe.”
Connor lowered his voice.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to stop asking me to design your behavior.”
He sat again.
The next week brought fragments instead of answers.
Mason hired an attorney and stopped cooperating. The detective obtained records showing that he had notarized the quitclaim deed on a Thursday afternoon when Connor’s company logs placed Connor at a bridge inspection in Kentucky. Amy’s signature had supposedly been witnessed the same hour, although a pediatric clinic record showed she had been in Nashville with Frederick.
That contradiction helped, but Dana warned them not to celebrate.
“Records can be challenged. Times can be entered incorrectly. We need more than one inconsistency.”
A title-company employee remembered Mason asking unusual questions about correcting a deed after recording. A bank teller remembered Teresa arriving with Mason and appearing nervous. Neither memory was firm enough to stand alone.
Then Connor found the closing folder’s inventory sheet in an old email.
The original deed had been stored in the locked study cabinet. Only Connor and Amy were listed as having keys.
“I lost mine last year,” Amy said.
Connor looked up.
“When?”
“After Teresa started staying with us more.”
“Did you tell me?”
“I told you I couldn’t find it.”
He remembered buying a replacement key ring at an airport shop and joking that Amy could lose an elephant in an empty room.
A quiet shame settled between them.
Connor contacted the locksmith who had changed the study lock during renovations. The invoice showed that Teresa had requested two extra keys, claiming Connor had approved them.
He had not.
It was another clue, useful but not decisive. The case accumulated that way: not one dramatic piece of proof, but a growing pile of small choices made under the assumption that no one would ever compare them.
Amy began meeting with a counselor twice a week. She did not tell Connor what they discussed.
He attended his own sessions after Dana said, “You need somewhere to put your guilt that isn’t your wife.”
He disliked the counselor immediately because the man had a bowl of polished stones on his desk and asked Connor where he felt anger in his body.
“In my schedule,” Connor said.
The counselor waited.
May you like
Connor looked at the stones.
After several seconds, he laughed despite himself.
