I let Colby talk for almost twenty minutes before my attorney slid the deed across the table.
Depositions are strange rooms. Quiet, over-lit, a stenographer’s fingers the only sound between questions, everyone painfully polite while they take each other apart. Colby had walked in like he owned the building, which was funny, in a way he didn’t understand yet. He wore the overcoat he wears for photos and the watch he mentions in every conversation, and he answered my attorney’s early questions with the lazy confidence of a man who’s sure the whole thing is a formality.
“Mr. Rourke,” Ms. Okafor had asked, “can you describe your business holdings for the record?”
And Colby was off. He couldn’t help himself. He described the coffee franchise like it was a small empire, six locations, “the future of this town,” the flagship on Main that “everybody knows.” He said, and the stenographer took it down word for word, that he “basically owned this town.” He looked at me when he said it. Two years since the divorce and he still needed me to see him win.
I’m Junie. When Colby and I split, he walked away smug because the business was in his name and I’d “get nothing.” What Colby never understood, because he never once read a document he could get someone else to read for him, is which name was on what.
Here is the part he’d forgotten, or never really knew. The buildings his coffee shops sit in belonged to my father. Dad bought that stretch of Main Street storefronts in the eighties, unglamorous brick boxes nobody wanted, and held them. When he died, he left them in a trust with me as sole trustee. Colby was around for the funeral. He was not around for the paperwork, because paperwork bored him, and he assumed, the way he assumed everything, that it would sort itself out in his favor.
While we were married, Colby’s franchise leased three of those storefronts from the family trust, including his precious flagship. And about a year ago, when the leases came up for renewal and the trust’s rent was set to rise, a signature appeared on the renewal documents freezing the rent at the old rate. My signature. As trustee.
Except I never signed them. I was in another state that week, at a conference, with a hotel key-card record and a keynote badge to prove it.
Colby had forged my name to freeze his own rent.
He didn’t know I knew. That was the whole point of letting him talk. Ms. Okafor asked him, gently, whether he had any agreements with the property owner regarding his leases. He said the rent was “locked in, all handled, all above board.” She asked if he’d ever discussed the lease terms with the trustee. He said, “Junie signed off on everything. We’re on good terms.”
That was when she slid the two documents across the table.
The county deed on the left, naming the Mercado Family Trust, Junie Mercado, sole trustee, as owner of the three parcels. And on the right, the lease renewal with my forged signature, dated to a week I was demonstrably a thousand miles away.
“Mr. Rourke,” Ms. Okafor said, “is this your understanding of who owns the buildings your business occupies?”
Colby looked at the deed. I watched the grin die by degrees, the way frost creeps across a window. He looked at the lease. At the signature. At me.
“That’s Junie’s signature,” he said, and his voice had lost all its Main Street swagger.
“Is it?” Ms. Okafor said. “Because Ms. Mercado was at a national franchising conference in another state on the date this was signed. We have the hotel records, the event badge, and three witnesses. So either she has a way to be in two places at once, or someone signed her name to freeze the rent on buildings she owns.”
His attorney asked for a recess. In the hallway, through the glass, I watched the color of the conversation change, watched Colby’s hands move, watched his lawyer not look happy.
Here’s what it came down to. I owned the buildings. All three, flagship included. The forged lease was void, which meant the rent reverted to the true rate, which meant Colby owed the trust the back difference for the entire time the fraud had been running. And forging a trustee’s signature on a legal document is not a small thing; it’s a crime, and it turned a civil rent dispute into something that could put him in front of a very different kind of court.
I didn’t want him in a cell. I want to be honest about that. What I wanted was for it to finally be true, out loud, on the record, in a room with a stenographer, that the man who told an entire town he “owned it” was a tenant in buildings my father bought and I hold. That the empire was rented. That the signature he’d built his little kingdom on was mine, and forged.
We settled. He signed a new lease at the real rate, paid back what he owed the trust, and in exchange I agreed not to pursue the forgery criminally, as long as every payment landed on time. If one doesn’t, the deal is off, and the forged document is still sitting in a folder with my name on it, waiting.
The flagship on Main is still there. His logo’s still in the window. But now, on the first of every month, Colby Rourke writes a check to the Mercado Family Trust for the privilege of standing on ground my father bought and never bragged about once.
He wanted to own the town. Turns out he was just leasing a corner of it from the woman he thought would get nothing.
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