Chapter 7: The Second Name
Patricia Sohn answered on the third ring.
I had asked Claire whether I should be the one to call.
Claire said yes — not because it was legally required, but because a call from another woman who had been through it would land differently than a call from an attorney.
She was right.
Patricia was sixty-one, recently retired from a career in hospital administration.
She had met Grant at a charity event four years earlier.
He had been charming and credible and had shown her a project with strong fundamentals.
She had invested two hundred and eighty thousand dollars of her own money — savings, carefully accumulated over decades.
She had been told last year that the interest had matured and been redeemed for its original value.
She had received a check.
She had been grateful.
"How much was the check?" I asked.
"Two hundred and ninety-four thousand," she said.
"A little more than I put in.
I thought that was fair."
"Patricia." I kept my voice level.
"The current assessed value of that interest is approximately eight hundred thousand dollars."
The line went silent.
"He paid me back my principal," she said slowly.
"And kept the rest."
"Yes."
Another silence.
Longer.
"I trusted him," she said.
Not angry yet.
Still in the stage before anger, where the ground is still shifting under you and you haven't found solid footing.
"So did I," I said.
We talked for forty minutes.
By the end, she had agreed to share her documents with Claire.
She had also told me something I hadn't known: she had a friend, a woman named Donna, who had been introduced to Grant through the same charity event.
Donna had also invested.
Donna had also been told her interest was redeemed.
I called Claire immediately after.
"There may be a third investor," I said.
Claire was quiet for a moment.
"How many projects has Harrow Urban completed in the last eight years?"
"I don't know."
"I'm going to find out," she said.
"Mara — if there are three of you, this isn't a dispute.
This is a pattern."
Grant called me that evening.
I let it go to voicemail.
He left a message — composed, measured, the voice he used in meetings when he wanted to sound reasonable.
"Mara.
I think we've both let this get further than it needed to go.
I'd like to sit down, just the two of us, and find a resolution that works for everyone.
No attorneys.
No pressure.
Just a conversation."
I listened to it once.
Then I forwarded it to Claire.
She called back within the hour.
"He's trying to get you alone before the DA's office gets involved," she said.
"Do not meet with him."
"I wasn't going to."
"Good." A pause.
"Claire from my office spoke with someone at the DA's office this afternoon.
They're interested.
They want to see the forensic document analysis before they commit, but they're interested."
"How long will the analysis take?"
"Ten days.
Maybe two weeks."
Ten days.
Two weeks.
Grant would not stay still for two weeks.
He would move, restructure, transfer, do whatever he could to make the holding entity harder to reach.
"Is there anything we can do to prevent him from moving the assets?" I asked.
"I'm filing for a temporary restraining order tomorrow morning," Claire said.
"It will freeze the Harborstone holding structure pending the outcome of the forensic review."
I exhaled.
"He's going to fight it," I said.
"He's going to try," Claire said.
"But the forged amendment is already in the county recorder's file.
That's his document.
He submitted it.
And it has your forged signature on it."
She paused.
"He handed us the case," she said.
"He just doesn't know it yet."
The next morning, I was at my drafting table when Theo came in with coffee and set it beside my site plan without a word.
I had told him everything the night before — Patricia, Donna, the possible pattern, the restraining order.
He sat across from me.
"How are you?" he asked.
Not how is the case.
Not what happens next.
How are you.
"I keep thinking about the version of me who signed those papers," I said.
"She was so tired.
She just wanted it to be over."
"She got through it," Theo said.
"She didn't know what she was signing away."
"No." He was quiet for a moment.
"But she built everything that's sitting in this room right now.
The practice.
This family.
She did that without knowing any of this was coming."
I looked at him.
"She did okay," he said simply.
Maisie appeared in the doorway in her school uniform, one sock on, one sock in her hand, completely unbothered by this fact.
"Mom," she said.
"I can't find the other one."
I stood up.
"Let's look."
The sock was behind the radiator.
It took four minutes.
By the time I got back to my coffee it was lukewarm, and the site plan was still waiting, and somewhere across the city a restraining order was being prepared with Grant's name on it.
May you like
It was a Tuesday.
It felt, for the first time in a long time, like a beginning.
