I looked at Brooke.
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She was shaking her head.
“No.”
Her voice was barely audible.
I looked back at my son.
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“The house at 4411 Fairground Road isn’t yours.”
Evan blinked.
“What?”
“It isn’t Brooke’s either.”
Brooke stepped forward.
“Stacey, stop.”
I didn’t.“It’s being foreclosed.”
The room erupted.
Not loudly at first.
It was more like a hundred people suddenly breathing at once.
Then came the whispers.
“Foreclosed?”
“That’s their house.”
“Didn’t her parents buy it?”
“Wait…”
Evan turned toward Brooke.
I had spent twenty-two years reading other people’s papers.
But the most important document I had ever read was the one that almost cost me my family.
And in the end, I was grateful I had read every word.
Because the signature I refused to give didn’t just save forty-five thousand dollars.
It saved my son.
It saved my granddaughter.
And, in a strange way, it saved me too.
The house on Fairground Road was never ours.
But the home we built afterward finally was.
And nobody could take that away from us.
