Chapter 8: What the Lawyer Found in the Filing
Martinez was parked at the end of the block.
He handed me a second coffee without a word.
I got in and we sat there for a moment watching a sprinkler run on the lawn across the street.
"How bad?" he said.
"She was planning to file before I got back.
Derek Allman is a real estate developer.
She gave him fifteen thousand dollars from our joint account.
He's got a lawyer named Simmons already lined up."
Martinez was quiet for a moment.
"She say anything useful?"
"She confirmed everything.
On speaker, with Derek on the line."
He looked at me.
"You got that recorded?"
I held up my phone.
The voice memo app had been running since I pressed the speaker button in the kitchen.
"Bro." He shook his head slowly.
"Okay.
Who are you calling?"
"A family law attorney.
You know anyone good?"
"My sister used Rebecca Cho when she divorced her first husband.
Said she was the sharpest person in the room every single time."
I called Rebecca Cho's office at 9:15 that morning.
Her assistant put me through within the hour.
I sat in Martinez's truck and laid out everything: the deployments, the withdrawals, the footage, the Venmo transfers, the business registration, the apartment deposit, the recording of Derek's phone call.
There was a pause on the line when I finished.
"You said the business was registered fourteen months ago?" Rebecca said.
"That's what the website shows."
"And your last deployment started eleven months ago?"
"Correct."
"So the business was registered while you were still home."
"Yes."
"Did you sign anything related to a business in the last eighteen months?
Any documents she may have put in front of you?"
I thought back.
There had been a period about sixteen months ago when Kendra had asked me to sign several documents related to refinancing a portion of the mortgage.
I had been preparing for deployment.
I had been distracted.
I had signed where she pointed.
"There were some mortgage documents," I said slowly.
"About sixteen months ago."
"I'm going to need copies of everything you signed in that period," Rebecca said.
"Mortgage documents, any investment paperwork, anything with your signature on it."
"Why?"
"Because if Derek Allman's company used your property as collateral to secure a business loan, your name may be on paperwork you never knowingly agreed to."
I looked at the house from the truck window.
"Is that possible?" I said.
"It's worth checking before she files," Rebecca said.
"Can you come in this afternoon?"
I was in Rebecca's office by two o'clock.
She had a conference room with a long table and a paralegal named Grace who took notes in a yellow legal pad and asked precise, quiet questions.
I spread everything out: the printed bank statements, the Venmo records, the USB drive with the camera footage, my phone with the recorded call.
Rebecca listened.
She read.
She watched twenty seconds of the footage, paused it, and made a note.
Then she pulled up the county property records on her laptop and turned the screen toward me.
"Is this your home address?"
"Yes."
"There's a second lien on the property," she said.
"Filed nine months ago.
The lienholder is listed as Allman Properties LLC."
The room was very quiet.
"She put a lien on the house," I said.
"Someone did," Rebecca said.
"And your signature is on the filing."
I stared at the screen.
My name.
My signature.
On a document I had never seen before in my life.
"That's not my signature," I said.
Rebecca looked at me steadily.
"I know," she said.
"That's why I asked about the mortgage documents."
Grace stopped writing.
She looked up from her legal pad.
"What we're potentially looking at," Rebecca said carefully, "is not just marital misconduct.
If this signature was forged, we're looking at deed fraud."
May you like
She let that sit for a moment.
"That changes things considerably," she said.
