The nervous man was Preston Kavanagh, the attorney who had represented the Whitcombs, and the reason federal agents were standing in his office was me. I had reported the fraud eleven days earlier, the morning a deed-transfer alert reached my work address, six thousand miles away, on an assignment my family assumed made me unreachable. It did not make me unreachable. It made me the kind of person whose signature on a legal document is verified against a government record before anything closes, and whose reports do not sit in a queue. Colby had forged a power of attorney, told a notary I signed it in a kitchen I had not been standing in, and convinced my mortgage company he had authority he never held. Every piece of it was federal, and every piece of it had his name on it.
The Whitcombs were innocent. That was the part that undid me most, standing in my parents’ living room under a banner celebrating the man who had stolen my house. A young couple had bought their first home with money that funded a crime, and the sale was voided, and they got every dollar back, and I met them for coffee that spring to apologize for something that was never mine to apologize for. They bought a place two streets from mine. Their daughter learned to ride a bike on my pavement.
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