Lisa Hawthorne cornered me in the feed store parking lot on a Tuesday morning, waving papers like victory flags. The sun was already brutal at nine o’clock, typical for Texas in late June, and I was loading fifty-pound grain bags into my truck bed when she appeared beside me, her designer heels sinking into the gravel. “Just wanted to thank you for the ranch,” she said, her voice pitched loud enough to carry across the lot where other customers were loading their vehicles.
“Five dollars was more than generous.”
She held up a deed transfer, my signature scrawled across the bottom in handwriting that looked nothing like my own.
Anyone who’d seen me sign breeding certificates, veterinary forms, or supply orders for the past twenty years would know immediately it was a forgery. But Lisa didn’t seem concerned about details like authenticity.
My husband Samuel sat in her Mercedes, watching through tinted glass but refusing to meet my eyes. I kept loading grain bags, each lift steady and controlled, while Lisa detailed her plans for my land—the land I’d built from nothing after my father’s death, the two thousand three hundred acres everyone said was worthless scrubland.
“Going to convert those old stables into a yoga studio,” she continued, gesturing with manicured nails that had never touched a hay bale or mucked a stall.
“Samuel says you won’t mind clearing out by Monday.”
Monday. Three days to leave the ranch I’d spent two decades building from the ground up. Tom Murphy, the feed store owner, stepped out from his doorway, his weathered face creased with confusion as he watched this scene unfold.
He’d sold me my first bag of feed when I was twenty-five, fresh from my father’s funeral, using his life insurance money to buy land everyone thought I was crazy to invest in.
“Everything all right, Lily?” Tom asked, his eyes moving between Lisa’s triumphant expression and my steady loading. “Just fine, Tom.” I positioned another bag in the truck bed with the same practiced efficiency I’d developed over twenty years of ranch work.
Lisa shoved the papers toward him. “Five dollars.
Legal and binding.
Samuel handled everything.”
That’s when I noticed Samuel’s hand on the car door handle, like he might get out to face me, then thinking better of it. Eighteen years of marriage, and he couldn’t even look me in the eye while stealing everything I’d built. The cowardice hurt more than the betrayal somehow.
The story doesn’t end here –
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