Lauren looked at me like she’d never seen me before.
“I didn’t know that,” she said.
“There’s a lot I never told you,” I said. “But I’m going to start.”
PART 9
The weeks that followed were not easy.
I wish I could say that everything wrapped up neatly the moment the moving truck pulled away. It didn’t. Real life doesn’t work that way.
Detective Moreno called me the following Thursday. The signature on the lease had been compared to my signature on the closing documents, my driver’s license, and a dozen other papers. It was, in her words, “a poor imitation.” They’d also found something else.
The lease was a template.
A free one, downloaded from a website.
The download history on Mark’s laptop, which Vanessa had voluntarily turned over, showed he’d downloaded it on August 28th.
Six days before my offer was even accepted.
