I looked at the text message on my phone one more time. “Check the name again,” my lawyer had written. The name on the screen belonged to my own father. I had just turned fifty, and my father had used my name to sign away the only thing our family still owned outright.
He had forged my signature on a deed transfer, moving our ancestral property into the offshore account of a man I’d never met. The betrayal was absolute. He had been planning this for years, keeping me close, always smiling, always using my name for the credit, the loans, the guarantees.
And now, with a single document, he had erased my legal standing entirely, planning to bury me in debt and silence me with a conservatorship before I ever had a chance to tell a judge I’d never seen that paper in my life.
