I drove to the county recorder’s office the next morning. I don’t even fully remember the drive. I know I stopped for gas because I was on empty and I remember thinking that was such a stupid thing to be dealing with, stopping for gas, when my hands were shaking like that.

When I got there I asked to see everything related to my father’s property, and the clerk, a woman probably around my age, pulled it up and then got a look on her face that I noticed immediately. Not pity exactly. More like she had been waiting for someone to come in and ask.

She said, “We actually flagged this one.”

I asked her what she meant by flagged it. She said that Wayne’s name had come up in property transfer filings three other times in recent months. Different properties, different elderly relatives, different counties nearby. She said the signatures on all of them matched a pattern that their office had started tracking. She was careful about how she said it, very measured, but I understood what she was telling me. This was not a one-time thing. This was not Wayne doing a favor for his confused old uncle. She told me the district attorney’s office had already been contacted. She said the combined value of the properties involved across all four transfers was something she started to read off to me, and I actually had to ask her to stop and repeat it because I genuinely did not process the number the first time she said it.

Wayne had already listed forty of those eighty-six acres for sale to a developer. There was a listing. Active. Forty acres for two hundred and eighty thousand dollars. I looked at it on my phone in the parking lot of the recorder’s office and there it was.

Dad’s back forty. The piece with the old pond on it, the one where we used to catch crawdads when we were kids, where Dad took me fishing probably a hundred times. Listed as a “development opportunity” with “excellent road access and flat terrain.”

I went to see Dad that afternoon. He was sitting at the kitchen table doing a word search, which he does every day, and he looked up and smiled at me and asked if I wanted coffee. I said sure. I sat down across from him and I just looked at him for a minute. I asked him if he remembered Wayne coming to visit recently, and he said oh yes, Wayne had come by, real nice of him. I asked if he remembered signing any papers and he thought about it and said he thought maybe there was something about taxes. He seemed relaxed about it. Unbothered. He trusts Wayne. We all did, more or less. Wayne has been at every Christmas, every birthday, every funeral. He held Dad’s hand at my mom’s burial.