Chapter 12 — FOUR HUNDRED AND TWELVE THOUSAND
The money moved on December 4.
I know because Alma had filed the lis pendens on October 9, and a lis pendens does not stop anybody from doing anything — it just means everyone who does something afterward does it with notice.
On December 4, the LLC assigned the deed of trust to a company in Delaware.
For a dollar.
"That's a laundering move," Alma said. "They're trying to create a holder in due course — somebody down the chain who can claim they bought the paper innocently and shouldn't be bound by whatever fraud happened before them."
"Does it work?"
"On a mortgage against real property with a lis pendens filed two months earlier? No. It's not even close to working."
"Then why do it?"
"Because it costs them nothing and it costs you four thousand dollars in legal fees to respond to."
That is the part nobody tells you.
Being right is not free.
Every single time these people did something stupid and doomed, I had to pay a lawyer to explain why it was stupid and doomed, and they knew that, and that was the entire strategy.
By January I had spent nineteen thousand dollars.
I sold my truck.
Not the work truck — the truck. The 2019 I had bought used two years earlier and had a lift kit on and had genuinely loved in the uncomplicated way you can love an object.
I got seventeen four for it and bought a 2011 Ranger for six and put the difference in the legal account.
I want to describe January accurately because a lot of these stories skip January.
In January nothing happens.
There is no hearing in January. There is no confrontation. Nobody says anything dramatic.
In January you get up at five thirty because the baby is up at five thirty, and you make two lunches, and you drive to a job you've been demoted at, and at 4:15 you pick up your daughter from aftercare, and she asks you every single day whether Mommy is coming for dinner, and you say not tonight, sweetheart, and she says okay in a voice that gets a little flatter every week.
In January you find out that a seven-year-old who has been holding a baby since summer does not stop when you take the baby away.
She hovers.
She stands at the crib rail. She gets the burp cloth before you ask. She wakes up at the first noise on the monitor, which is in my room, not hers, and she still wakes up first.
I took her to a therapist in Cary named Dr. Elle Barrow, who saw her weekly and told me in the fourth week that the clinical term she would eventually use in a report was parentification, and that the good news was that Josie was seven and not thirteen.
"What's the difference?"
"At seven, she took the job because she was asked to. At thirteen they take it because they've decided nobody else will do it. That one's harder to give back."
In January, Corinne saw the kids twice.
Supervised, at a center on Six Forks with a two-way mirror and a bin of donated toys, for ninety minutes.
She brought Josie a stuffed rabbit.
She held Theo for the whole ninety minutes both times, and the supervisor's notes both times said appropriate and attentive, which I read four times each and did not know what to do with.
On the drive home after the second one Josie said, from the back seat, "Mommy smelled like her old smell."
"What's her old smell?"
"From before."
"Before what?"
Josie looked out the window.
"Before she got busy."
The DNA kit came in the mail on February 2.
It sat on top of the refrigerator, unopened, for nineteen days.