“…Daniela Castellano,” the woman said, smiling, in my bedroom at midnight, and on the other end of the line my lawyer gasped as if she had been slapped. I had put her on speaker and set the phone on the dresser. “Allison,” said Ms. Tran, in a voice I had never heard from her before, “do not let that woman leave the house. I am calling the sheriff. Daniela Castellano is on a bulletin the state bar sent out last month. She is wanted in three counties for deed fraud. She marries, or poses as a relative, and takes the homes of professional women who travel.”
The color left Marco face. He had been sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands between his knees. Daniela did not move. She stood quite still in my blue silk robe, holding the folder, and for the first time her smile faded. She looked at the door. She looked at the window. I will say for the woman that she never raised her voice. “Marco,” she said quietly, “you told me she would not check.” Then she set the folder carefully on my nightstand, picked up her purse, and said, “I think I will go for a walk.”
She did not get far. I had called the sheriff myself in the same breath as my lawyer, and a cruiser from the Jacksonville Sheriff Office was already turning into my street. Two deputies met her on the front walk. She had changed into jeans and a sweater, with a packed overnight bag she must have kept in the guest room closet. In the bag they found six passports, four driver licenses in four names, and a ring of keys to houses I had never seen. I stood in the doorway in my traveling clothes, watching, with my arms folded. I felt nothing at all.
A blue silk robe in a guest room closet, a deed stamped in red, and a pool party at midnight.
That left Marco. He sat in our kitchen at two in the morning, in a rumpled T shirt, with the lights on and a deputy at the door. For a long time I did not look at him. When I did, I saw a man of fifty four, thin, ashamed, his face the color of paste. He said Daniela had met him at the conference, as she had met other men. She had been warm and attentive and told him his wife did not understand him. She had said she needed a place to stay. Within a month she was in his bed, and within three, he had signed whatever she placed in front of him.
“I never thought she was a criminal,” he said. “I thought she loved me.” I said, “Marco, she moved into our house while I worked to pay for it.” He covered his face. He told me that he had forged my signature, that he had used the expired power of attorney, that he had done a thing which could send him to prison. He said he did not expect me to forgive him. I said it was just as well. I put on a pot of coffee, called my lawyer back, and by four in the morning, I had a plan.
The criminal case moved quickly. Daniela Castellano, whose real name turned out to be Dana Cruz, was charged with fraud, forgery and grand theft in three counties, and Marco, to his credit, agreed to testify against her in exchange for a reduced charge. He pleaded to a single count of forgery. The judge, who had little patience for what she called self inflicted wounds, sentenced him to two years of probation and a hundred hours of community service. He lost his coaching job. He did not argue. He moved to his brother house in Gainesville, a week after the hearing.
The deed was voided that November. A clerk at the county recorder office stamped it with a single red word, FRAUDULENT, and returned the original to my lawyer. I held it in my hands in her office, a plain white piece of paper, and thought about how many things in life depend on a signature. For the first time in months, I laughed out loud. I had paid off the house with my own commission checks. I had paid for the pool. I had paid for the guest room where a stranger had slept in my robe. All of it was mine.
I filed for divorce in December. I changed the locks. I replaced the mattress, repainted the master bedroom a pale gray, and gave every item of Marco clothing to a charity shop on Beach Boulevard. I kept the bourbon, though, the bottle I had brought home from Denver. On New Year Eve, I invited six friends over for a pool party, the women I had been too busy traveling to see in ten years. We sat in the warm dark, in robes and bathing suits, drinking bourbon, with the lights glowing blue under the water.
One friend, a retired judge named Odessa, raised her glass and said, “To Allison, who came home two days early.” We laughed, loudly, and splashed, and the hush of the neighborhood swallowed us. I thought of the girl who had once believed that love meant putting up with whatever came. I raised my glass to her too. Then I told the women about the little things I had learned: to read every paper, to expire every power of attorney, and to always, always, come home a day early.
I still travel two weeks a month. But now I have a camera at the door, a lock that clicks, and a new rule: I never leave town without calling the neighbor. And on the nights I come home, when the Uber lets me off at the curb and I walk up the path to my own front door, I stop for a moment and look at the lit windows. It is a good house. It is mine. And somewhere in the guest room closet, folded in tissue, is a blue silk robe, which I have decided to keep.
