Chapter 2

"No, we didn't."

My fingers tightened around the blue folder.

Daniel took one careful step toward me, his voice deliberately gentle.

"You were upset. It was a long conversation."

"I would remember agreeing to give you my house."

"Our house," Daniel corrected.

Emma touched my arm. I pulled away before I could stop myself.

Her hurt expression nearly weakened me. Then I saw what lay beneath it.

Pity.

She was not deciding whether to believe me. She had already decided I was confused and was trying not to frighten me.

My stomach clenched. I gripped the folder with both hands to keep them from shaking. I had spent nineteen years making myself the person Emma could always depend on. Now she was handling me like someone who might break.

Lauren curled her fingers over my mother's ring.

I faced her.

"Tell me when I gave you that."

Lauren glanced at Daniel instead of answering.

That was answer enough.

Emma stepped closer, her brow pinched with concern.

"You said you couldn't find it. You told me you might have left it at the grocery store."

"I told you it was missing. I never said anything about a grocery store."

"Yes, you did." Emma lowered her voice.

"At lunch last month. The lunch you forgot we had planned."

I remembered dressing for that lunch. I also remembered Daniel calling from a job site, saying a contractor had been injured and he needed me to bring insurance papers. By the time I arrived, no one had been hurt.

He later insisted I had misunderstood.

A cold pressure spread through my chest.

"How many times has he told you I forgot something?"

Daniel's expression hardened.

"Kate."

Emma's eyes filled.

"Dad said you didn't want me to worry."

She reached for me again. I stepped back.

I could endure her anger. Her compassion was unbearable.

I opened the separation agreement and held the signature toward her.

"Look at it. I didn't write this."

Emma barely glanced down.

"How am I supposed to know that?"

Because you are my daughter, I almost said.

Because I stayed home when you were sick. Because I attended every recital and sat awake through every heartbreak.

But Daniel had spent months teaching her to treat my certainty as another symptom.

Lauren set down her glass. Her face had gone carefully blank.

"Daniel showed me the signed agreement. I understood that you had accepted the terms."

"You understood what he told you."

Daniel reached for the folder, but I turned away and flipped past the agreement.

Under the *Property* tab, our joint investment account was listed with a zero balance. A transfer notation pointed to Daniel's company.

The next page identified me as the personal guarantor of a business loan I had never seen.

A false signature. An emptied account. A debt in my name.

I closed the folder and pressed it against my chest.

"This is coming with me."

Daniel held out his hand.

"No. Give it to me."

"It contains documents with my name on them."

"They're part of a private settlement."

"A settlement I never agreed to."

Daniel moved closer.

"You can't take documents from my property."

"Your property?"

I looked past him.

On the sideboard sat the lopsided ceramic platter Emma had painted when she was nine, her small yellow handprints pressed around its rim. We had used it every Thanksgiving since.

Now Lauren had arranged bread on it for their engagement dinner.

One familiar object was enough.

Daniel had not simply found another woman. He was building a replacement life and moving pieces of mine into it. My ring. My family's money. My daughter.

My place.

The kitchen timer sounded.

Emma turned toward the stove. Daniel glanced after her, and Lauren moved close enough for her shoulder to brush mine.

Her fingers closed around my wrist, hidden between our bodies.

"The transfer from your investment account is real," Lauren whispered. Fear tightened her mouth.

"Keep the folder."

Then she released me and stepped back.

She had confirmed what the documents already showed: Daniel needed this evidence under his control.

I had to leave before he took it.

I ran.

Daniel shouted my name as I pushed through the door. I took the steps too quickly, one hand gripping the rail and the other crushing the folder against my ribs.

I reached the sidewalk before he caught up.

His fingers closed around the folder.

"Give it to me."

I jerked backward.

My heel dropped off the curb. A horn exploded beside me, followed by Daniel's face changing from anger to shock.

The blue folder flew from my hands.

Then the delivery van hit me.