Officer Lane explained that Derek had borrowed from a private lender and now owed sixty thousand dollars. My parents panicked and made a plan. They would invent an emergency to rush twenty-five thousand dollars out of me, forge my name on a loan as backup, and secretly transfer the lake cottage to themselves to sell. Jenna had been told only that she was helping pay hospital bills. The sticky note was their script, written to stop me from asking where my brother really was.

The man Jenna warned me about was the lender’s collector. He had pounded on my parents’ door in the middle of the night, and a neighbor called 911, which is why officers were there at 2:40. They found the loan papers on the table and my brother holding a bandaged hand he had hurt punching a cabinet in frustration. Within minutes, Lane’s partner reached Jenna’s car, and the collector was arrested for threats that same night. The police then asked whether I wanted to press charges for the forged signature. I did not answer right away.