My Husband Served Me Divorce Papers Over My Father’s Casket — He Had No Idea What I’d Already Signed That Morning

Part 2

I signed my name four times.

Greg Holt witnessed each one, dated them, collected everything back into his folder with the efficiency of a man who does this before lunch on a regular basis.

Todd hugged me.

Put his arms around me like he meant it, like seven years had meant something.

“Thank you for being reasonable,” he said into my shoulder.

I stepped back.

They left.

Footsteps down the stairs, then Todd’s voice in the basement, easy and relaxed, chatting with someone like he’d just finished a mild errand.

I stood alone in that room for thirty seconds, surrounded by crayon drawings of Jesus with lambs, and then I went back down.

For the next two hours, I accepted condolences.

Listened to stories about my father I had never heard.

The woman from the Seventh Avenue duplex had kept every rent receipt for nineteen years — every one on time, each with a handwritten thank-you note.

An elderly man named Curtis told me Dad had fixed his granddaughter’s car last winter, middle of January, wouldn’t hear of taking money for it.

The young couple from Cedar Street described Dad installing a playground set in their backyard over a weekend, alone, because he felt kids needed safe places.

I had not known any of this.

I had thought I knew my father.

Carol arrived around two o’clock and positioned herself near the coffee station.

I walked over.

“It’s done,” I told her quietly.

She nodded once.

“Good.

Now we wait.”

Todd left early.

Kissed my forehead, promised to check in later, didn’t.

I helped the church ladies stack chairs and wrap up casseroles until the last car pulled out of the lot.

Then I drove to a Holiday Inn and paid cash and checked in under my mother’s maiden name, because Carol had suggested it that morning.

Let him think it’s all going according to plan.

Let him get comfortable.

I lay on the hotel bed in my funeral dress and finally opened the sealed letter from my father.

His handwriting covered three pages.

I read it twice.

The postscript stopped me cold.

The commercial property on Fourth Street — the one I leased to Todd three years ago at below market rate to give him a real shot.

Check with the property management company.

I called Riverside Properties from the hotel room.

The woman who answered, Sandra, already knew who I was.

She was sorry for my loss.

And then she told me that Todd had sublet Roy’s building to a vape shop eighteen months ago without authorization, collecting roughly three thousand dollars a month from the subtenant while paying my father twelve hundred and crying poverty at home.

Forty-seven thousand dollars in back rent and damages.

A civil lawsuit my father had filed two weeks before he died.

I sat on that bed for a long time after the call.

Todd had stolen from my father.

Not metaphorically.

Not by accident.

He had looked Roy in the eye, taken his generosity, and turned it into a revenue stream.

And then he’d come home and told me the business was struggling and that Dad didn’t understand modern retail.

I thought about the eighteen months of that.

The dinners where I’d eaten sandwiches I packed because we couldn’t afford the cafeteria.

The stack of red-stamped envelopes on the counter.

The credit card in my name.

And I kept thinking: if Todd had stolen from my father for eighteen months without anyone catching it, who else had been watching — and for how long?