Chapter 2 - THE CALL SHE DIDN’T WANT ME TO HEAR
I grabbed the phone before Theresa could.
She caught my wrist.
“Give me that.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re hysterical.”
I looked at the blood on my hand.
“You threw a pot at me.”
“And now you’re stealing private papers.”
“From my drawer?”
Mitchell stepped between us.
“Everybody needs to calm down.”
I laughed.
It came out flat.
“You’ve got a forged loan application in our bedroom, your mother just tried to rearrange my face with cookware, and you smell like somebody else’s perfume. Which part should I calm down about first?”
His eyes flicked toward the open folder.
“Nothing has been funded.”
That was the wrong answer.
I hadn’t asked whether it had been funded.
I backed away from him.
“So it’s real.”
“It’s an application.”
“With my fake signature.”
“We were going to talk to you.”
“After you signed my name?”
Theresa cut in.
“You don’t understand the finances in this house.”
I looked at her.
“I paid one hundred twenty thousand dollars toward the down payment.”
Her mouth tightened.
That money had come from my mother’s estate.
My mother never owned much. She worked thirty-one years for the Mecklenburg County library system, packed lunches in the same faded plastic container, and drove a Honda until the upholstery split.
When she died, the house she had bought in the nineties sold for more than anyone expected.
My share became the down payment on this townhouse.
Mitchell knew what that money meant to me.
He also knew I had refused twice to use the equity for his business ideas.
“Where was the money going?” I asked.
“We didn’t take anything.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Mitchell rubbed his forehead.
“Can we not do this while you’re bleeding?”
“You didn’t care when I started bleeding.”
His hand dropped.
For the first time, he looked ashamed.
It lasted about three seconds.
Then Theresa said, “Mitchell, stop letting her control the conversation.”
I stared at her.
There it was.
Not family.
Strategy.
I opened the folder again.
There were copies of our mortgage statement, tax assessment, homeowners insurance, and two months of my bank statements.
My personal bank statements.
The account where my freelance income was deposited.
“How did you get these?”
Mitchell said nothing.
I turned another page.
A preliminary closing disclosure showed estimated fees.
The lender name meant nothing to me.
The title company did.
Voss Settlement Services.
“Who’s Voss?”
Mitchell’s jaw moved.
Theresa said, too quickly, “A closing company.”
I looked at the lipstick stain.
Then back at the paper.
“Who works there?”
Nobody answered.
That answer was loud enough.
I picked up my cell phone from the dresser.
Mitchell moved in front of me.
“Who are you calling?”
“My bank.”
“You’re overreacting.”
“I’m checking whether somebody stole my identity.”
“Danielle.”
“Move.”
He didn’t.
I raised the phone.
“If you physically stop me from calling my bank after I found a forged loan application, this becomes a very different morning.”
His face hardened.
But he moved.
I called the bank’s fraud department from the hallway.
Theresa and Mitchell stayed in the bedroom, speaking so quietly I couldn’t hear.
The fraud representative asked security questions, then placed me on hold.
I watched Mitchell through the doorway.
He had picked up the cast-iron pot.
Not to apologize.
He carried it into the bathroom and set it in the tub.
My stomach turned.
He was removing it from the scene.
The bank representative came back.
“Mrs. Grant?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t see a home-equity line with us.”
I closed my eyes.
“Okay.”
“But I do see two external verification requests against your checking account within the last thirty days.”
I opened them again.
“What kind of verification?”
“Account ownership and balance confirmation.”
“From who?”
“I’m not permitted to see the full third-party application from here, but I can give you the institution identifier.”
I wrote it on the back of an envelope.
It matched the lender in the blue folder.
The application hadn’t been sitting forgotten in a drawer.
Someone had been actively working on it.
“When were the requests?”
“The most recent was yesterday afternoon.”
Yesterday.
Mitchell had told me he was in Gastonia meeting a client.
I turned toward the bedroom.
He was staring directly at me.
The representative asked whether I wanted a fraud alert added.
“Yes.”
“Absolutely.”
Then she said something else.
“There is one additional issue you should know about.”
My grip tightened.
“What?”
“Yesterday’s verification request included an authorization code generated from your online banking profile.”
I stopped breathing for a second.
“That’s impossible.”
“It means whoever submitted it had access beyond just your account number.”
May you like
Across the hall, Mitchell slowly put his hand into his trouser pocket.
And I knew exactly where my missing backup phone was.
