Chapter 3 - Priscilla VancePriscilla Vance's office occupied a converted Victorian just off the town square, and she greeted me at the door herself, a compact, sharp-eyed woman in her sixties with the unhurried confidence of someone who had genuinely seen everything a family law and real estate dispute could possibly produce.
"Monica sent me the documents last night," she said, settling behind her desk. "I've had a chance to review the authentication reports. I want to walk through everything with you directly, but Claire, I'll tell you upfront — this is a serious matter, considerably more serious than a simple marital disagreement over property."
She spread the eleven documents across her desk, along with several pages of her own notes.
"The forged email address is damning on its own," she said. "But what concerns me more is the pattern across all five documents requiring your signature. Whoever did this understood the listing process well enough to know exactly which documents needed authorization, and structured the timeline specifically to minimize the window in which you might discover the discrepancy before closing."
"Do you think Andrew did this himself? Or someone helping him?"
"That's what we need to determine," Priscilla said. "Real estate fraud at this level typically requires either significant technical sophistication, or someone with genuine industry knowledge helping to execute it. Given that your husband works in commercial real estate development, I'd want to understand exactly how much of this expertise might have come from him directly, versus from someone else involved."
"Celeste," I said. "She's a real estate agent. I remember Andrew mentioning it once, months ago, before I understood what she actually was to him."
Priscilla made a note. "That would explain considerably more about how sophisticated this attempted fraud actually is. A working agent would understand exactly how to structure fraudulent listing documents to look legitimate, how electronic signature authentication typically works, and how to move a property through an expedited closing before ownership questions might naturally arise."
I sat with the growing understanding that this hadn't been an impulsive decision, born of desperation or poor judgment in a difficult moment. This had been planned, carefully, by two people with the specific expertise required to execute it convincingly.
"What do we do first?" I asked.
"First, we send Daniel Ross's brokerage a formal cease-and-desist, halting the listing entirely and preserving all documentation related to it. Second, we file a police report — not because I necessarily expect immediate criminal prosecution, though that remains possible, but because an official report creates a documented timeline that will matter significantly if this proceeds to civil litigation, or if Andrew attempts any further unauthorized action regarding the property. Third, I want to formally document, through the county recorder's office, that Westfield remains solely titled in your name, separate property under your aunt's will, entirely outside any marital asset pool."
"And Andrew?"
Priscilla considered this carefully. "Given what you've described about the pattern of your marriage — the dismissiveness, the affair, and now what appears to be attempted property fraud — I'd strongly recommend we begin divorce proceedings in parallel with addressing the Westfield situation. The two matters are related, but they'll need to be handled with slightly different urgency. The fraud attempt needs immediate action to protect the property. The marriage itself, I suspect, based on everything you've told me, has already ended in every meaningful sense — we're simply formalizing what's already true."
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I thought about Andrew's flat, entitled answer in my dining room the day before — because we're married, marriage means sharing — and understood, with a strange, quiet clarity, that Priscilla was right. Whatever had remained of our marriage had likely ended long before the open house. The open house had simply been the moment I'd finally been forced to see it clearly.
"Let's move on all of it," I said. "The fraud, the divorce, all of it. I'm done being surprised by pieces of this. I want to understand exactly what I'm actually dealing with."
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