Chapter 12 - The Story Alma Sold
By noon the next day, Alma had told a different version of events to half the town.
A local website published an interview in which she said Elena had suffered an emotional episode, smashed a glass of cranberry juice onto the bed, and accused her of violence over a dispute about inheritance. Alma displayed an old photograph of herself holding me as a boy.
The headline called her A DEVOTED MOTHER CAUGHT IN A FAMILY FEUD.
My phone filled with messages. Some people asked whether Elena was all right. Others told me I should respect the woman who had raised me. One person wrote that Elena was lucky Alma hadn't pressed charges.
I wanted to answer every message. Elena stopped me.
“People who want to believe the story won't change their minds because you type harder,” she said.
The bruises on her wrist had turned purple. She held our ultrasound photograph over them, as if she could cover one truth with another.
We spoke to a lawyer, Miri Chen, who helped us arrange protective orders and preserve evidence. Miri was direct in a way I appreciated.
“Protect Elena's privacy. Don't fight the criminal case online. And don't sign anything your mother sends.”
That last warning seemed obvious until an overnight courier delivered a thick packet to my office. Alma had signed a declaration making me responsible for every financial decision at Harbor Light Care. Attached were copies of banking resolutions bearing my name.
“I've never seen these,” I told Miri.
She examined the dates. “You were nineteen when the earliest one was filed.”
“I was in college in Oregon. I barely knew what Harbor Light was.”
“You may need to prove that.”
Elena recognized the format immediately. “Those are the missing pages,” she said. “The county invoices reference approvals from Noah, but the supporting signatures weren't in the files.”
She leaned closer to the page and pointed at a small raised mark beside a notary stamp.
“That's not just a copied signature,” she said. “Someone used your old student ID signature as a model.”
I remembered Alma asking for a scan of that ID when I was nineteen. She said she needed it for a family insurance policy.
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Miri flipped to the final page. There was a second forged signature: Elena's.
And beside it, a line assigning our unborn child a beneficiary number before we'd told anyone about the pregnancy.
