Chapter 9 - MY NAME IN HIS HANDWRITING
For a moment, I couldn’t hear anything.
Raymond was asking whether I wanted the car in the garage.
I kept staring at the signature.
It looked like mine if you had seen it once and thought confidence could replace accuracy.
“Simone?”
I handed him the baby bag.
“Please take this inside.”
The application named Roland’s company.
The requested loan was sixty thousand dollars.
My income was listed.
My employment information.
Our address.
My Social Security number.
I called Maya before calling Roland.
She asked me to photograph every page and preserve the packet.
Then she helped me start checking whether it had been submitted and securing access to my personal accounts.
“Finding it doesn’t tell us everything yet,” she said. “We need records.”
I appreciated that she didn’t turn uncertainty into a promise.
By evening, Roland admitted he had started the application.
“I never finished it.”
“You signed my name.”
“It was a worksheet.”
“Worksheets don’t need my signature.”
“I was going to ask you.”
“After you practiced being me?”
He went silent.
I walked to the window.
Below, Dad stood in the garden holding Wren against his shoulder while Mrs. Alvarez pointed out something in a flowerbed.
A tiny, ordinary scene.
The life I could have been living that afternoon.
“I want you to communicate through Maya about the money,” I said.
“Simone—”
“And through me about Wren. Only Wren.”
“You can’t turn our marriage into office hours.”
“You turned my identity into an application.”
His breathing changed.
Then came the voice I had fallen in love with.
Quiet. Hurt. Almost shy.
“Do you remember the apartment with the leaking ceiling?”
I closed my eyes.
We had eaten takeout on the floor while rain dripped into a cooking pot.
He had called it our indoor water feature.
I had laughed until my face hurt.
“Of course I remember.”
“I’m still that guy.”
“No,” I said. “You’re the man asking me to remember him.”
I ended the call before he could answer.
Later, the lender confirmed the incomplete application had reached its system but had not been funded. Maya began working through the dispute with me.
There would be paperwork.
There would be questions.
There would be no magic eraser.
At eleven that night, Faye sent a screenshot from a new family group chat.
May you like
Celeste had written:
Simone is not herself after the birth. We need to bring her home before her father convinces her to take Wren away permanently.
