I opened the folder on my kitchen counter and laid the deed flat beneath the light.
My name appeared exactly where it had appeared since the day I bought the beach house.
Bella Carter.
No Paige.
No Mark.
No parents.
No mysterious family trust.
No shared ownership.
No clause granting my sister the right to move herself into a bedroom because she had arrived with enough relatives to make resistance uncomfortable.
Just me.
Ethan stood beside me while Milo watched from the other side of the kitchen.
She had stopped coloring.
I hated that she was seeing any of this, but I hated even more that she had spent years watching adults treat cruelty as normal simply because it came wrapped in the word family.
The property manager was still on the phone.
“Do not let those boxes through the gate,” I said.
“I won’t.”
“And photograph every page Paige gives you.
Don’t keep anything from her.
Just document it.”
There was a pause.
“You think it’s fake?”
“I know I never signed a lease.”
On the security feed, Paige had moved closer to the guard station.
Her sunglasses were now pushed onto the top of her head.
She kept pointing toward the house as if repetition might transform entitlement into ownership.
Behind her, relatives were opening coolers and unfolding chairs beside the parked SUVs.
They had apparently decided the standoff would be temporary.
That told me Paige had prepared them for resistance.
What she had not prepared them for was me refusing to rescue her from it.
A photograph of the document reached my phone two minutes later.
I enlarged the first page.
It was titled as a residential occupancy agreement.
The address was mine.
Paige was listed as the occupant.
The term began that Friday.
Six months.
My chest tightened.
This was not a reunion that had gotten out of hand.
The reunion was camouflage.
Paige intended to move into my beach house.
The signature at the bottom looked like mine from a distance.
It even had the looping B I used when signing hospital paperwork quickly between cases.
But it wasn’t mine.
Whoever had copied it had made one small mistake.
I had stopped signing my full middle initial years earlier after my hospital changed its credentialing system.
The signature on Paige’s document used the old version.
It looked as though someone had copied it from an older document.
Ethan saw it too.
“She copied your signature.”
I zoomed in on the date.
Three weeks earlier.
Three weeks earlier, Paige had been texting me photos from a family birthday dinner, asking whether we should “do something bigger at the beach” later in the summer.
I had answered vaguely because I had been between surgeries.
Apparently, while I thought she was fishing for a reunion invitation, she was building a paper trail in her own head.
My phone rang again.
Paige.
