I have thought many times since about how close it came to working.
If I had arrived on Saturday instead of Friday, I would have had no sense of urgency. If I had gone back to Philadelphia after Tiffany turned me away, which the old version of me would have done, I would not have stood at that window. If I had not had Mara’s number in my phone from twenty-two years of gratitude, I would have been navigating the county records office alone and unsure whether what I was seeing was real.
And if I had done what Tiffany predicted, which was fold, it might have worked.
That is the part that stayed with me longest. Not the fraud, not the forged deed, not even Peter’s name on a petition designed to prove I could no longer be trusted with my own life. The part that stayed with me was that Tiffany knew my character well enough to design a trap around it.
