Chapter 3

I drove to the recorder's office before it opened and stood outside with my coffee like a woman waiting on a hardware store.

The clerk who took my form was maybe twenty-five and very careful with the stapler.

"You're withdrawing the pending application," she said. "You understand that's the applicant's filing, not yours."

"The applicant is applying to add himself to property I hold alone. I'm the owner of record. Tell me I can't."

She checked something on her screen for longer than she needed to.

"You can," she said. "You'll want to note the reason."

"Put down that the owner objects."

While she typed I asked for one more thing. Josie's birth record lists her surname as Hollis, and it always has, and nobody had touched it — but I wanted it pulled and checked and stamped by a person, on paper, with a date on it, because I had spent forty-eight hours learning what happens to things nobody checks.

It cost eleven dollars. I paid it in cash.

Outside, the sun was doing that flat white thing it does in late August, and my car was too hot to sit in, so I stood next to it and opened the neighborhood thread on my phone.

Two hundred and forty people are in that thread. I started it. I ran the plant swap out of it for six years.

Denise's album was pinned at the top. Fran Lowell's comment had eleven likes. Somebody had replied to it with three champagne glasses.

I did not delete anything, and I did not report anything, and I did not type one word about Grant, because the second you make it about the husband, half the women in a thread like that decide it's a marriage problem and stop reading.

I typed one thing, and I read it twice before I sent it, and then I sent it.

"You can call her whatever you like," I wrote, with ninety of them watching me type it. "But the deed says Hollis, and so do I, and I'm still standing in the kitchen."