I Had Already Signed Before He Landed

Jennifer was quiet for long enough that I could hear her thinking. "Tessa," she said finally. "The house is still legally yours?"

"Yes."

"Brent was never added to the title?"

"Never."

"Mortgage?"

"Paid off last spring."

"Prenuptial?"

"Still fully enforceable."

She let out a breath that was not quite a sigh. "And your daughter is three days old."

I looked at Ivy in the mirror, seven pounds of warmth in a pink blanket, entirely unaware that her first week of life outside the hospital had become something her mother was going to have to manage with the same precision she applied to everything else. "Three days," I said. "He changed the code before he left for Miami."

"I'm opening every file we have," Jennifer said, and her voice had gone to the register it went to when she had made a decision and the decision was not going to be revised. "Elliot has been sitting on a buyer for this property for four months. All-cash offer. I have been waiting for you to tell me you were ready."

"Tell him I'll review a serious offer tonight."

"Where are you now?"

"My sister's in ten minutes."

"Call Molly. And Tessa, don't go back to the house alone tonight."

I called Molly before I had pulled out of the driveway. She answered on the first ring. Molly had never trusted Brent with the specific intuition of a person who sees through performance faster than most, and she had told me so once, early, and then never again, because that is what good sisters do. They tell you once and then they wait.

"Are you home?" she asked.

"I'm outside."

"Outside where?"

"At the house. He changed the code."

She did not pause. She did not ask me to explain. "I'm coming right now."