I got an attorney. Her name is Diane and she does this kind of thing, construction stuff, real estate fights. I brought her everything. The lien, the signed paper, my receipts for materials, all of it.

I sat in her office on a Tuesday. Or maybe a Wednesday. It doesn’t matter.

I told her I’d find the money if I had to. I told her I’d take a second mortgage on my own place. I just needed to stop the clock. Eighty-seven thousand dollars or a court order to throw the lien out. Those were my two roads.

Diane was real calm about it at first. She kept reading. She flipped to the back page of the lien, the part with the stamp on it, the notary part. You know how every legal document has that little section where someone official watches you sign and stamps it so it counts.

She got quiet. She read it again. Then she set the papers down and looked at me different than before.

“There’s a problem,” she said.

I thought she meant the case was weak. I braced for that.

Then she turned the page around so I could see it and put her finger right under the notary’s name and signature at the bottom.

“The notary who witnessed your mother sign this,” she said. “That’s your daughter. That’s Ashley.”

My Ashley. My kid. She’d gotten her notary license two years ago for her office job, I’d been so proud of her, I’d posted it on Facebook. And her name was right there at the bottom of the paper that’s about to take her own grandmother’s house. The same grandmother who watched her every day after school for ten years. Her stamp. Her signature. Witnessing the whole thing.

I didn’t say anything. Diane asked if I was okay and I told her yeah, give me a second, but I wasn’t okay, because now I had to figure out something so much worse than money. Did Ashley know what she was signing? Did Danny use her, walk her through it like it was nothing, the way he did to Mom? Or did she know exactly what it was?

I haven’t asked her yet. That’s the truth. It’s been six days and I have not been able to pick up the phone and call my own daughter, because I’m scared of which answer I’m gonna get.

The foreclosure clock is still going. Thirty-nine days now. Mom still drinks her coffee on the porch every morning, the porch my dad built, and she doesn’t know any of this, and I haven’t told her, because what do I even say. Your son did this. Your granddaughter signed it. I’m the only one who paid for anything and I’m the only one who looks like the fool.

Thirty-nine days. I keep counting them. And every single morning when I wake up the first thing I think isn’t the eighty-seven thousand dollars.