Sunday my granddaughter set her homework on my kitchen table and asked me to check her work. Every line on that page was my name. She is seven. Nobody in that house knows I kept it. They think it went in the recycling with her spelling list.

Hannah comes to me Tuesdays and Thursdays. I cut her bologna into triangles and she works at the end of the table where the light is good. Sunday she slid a page across to me and put her chin on my arm.

“Is that how you do your G?” she said.

Twenty-two lines of my name, down the paper in her round little pencil letters. Some of them tipped forward at the end, the way mine does when I am in a hurry.

“Mommy says practice makes it look real,” she said.

I did not ask that child one question. I told her the G was very good. I put a star at the top of the page, and I put the page in my church cookbook, the one with my name printed in the front.

The tax statement came last month with a different name in the window. My son’s, and his wife’s. Mine is off of it.

A man with a clipboard came around the side of my house on Thursday to look at the roof. He was pleasant about it. He said the owners had asked him to come out and give them a price before winter.

I called Brett. He was in his truck, and I could hear his blinker going.

“It’s a tax thing, Mom,” he said. “It saves you money in the long run. Don’t make it into a whole thing.”

“All right,” I said.

Then he said, “You’d be the first one to say you can’t do those stairs forever.”

The recorder’s office is down in the basement of the courthouse, and the young man behind the window will pull anything up for you if you ask him nice. He said there is a deed on my house, recorded March 14, with my signature on the bottom of it, notarized.

I know exactly where I was on March 14. I was in the front office of the elementary school on Bell Street at twenty minutes to two, signing the visitor book, because Hannah had come down sick in the gym and there was nobody else to come get her.

Mrs. Prine has kept that book for twenty-six years. She did not ask me why I wanted it.

“Honey, we don’t throw those away,” she said. “You sit in the good chair and I’ll run you a copy.”

So that is what is in my cookbook now. The practice page. The tax statement. A copy of my own handwriting from that afternoon with the date printed across the top and Mrs. Prine’s initials beside it.

Kelsey drove me to get my license renewed in the spring. She carried my pocketbook in for me on account of the doors. I did not think one thing about it at the time.

There is one more thing on Hannah’s page, and it is the part that keeps me up at night. She practiced a second name on the back. Gene. Four letters, over and over, in the same round pencil.

Gene has been in the ground six years.

I have not said a word to anybody in that family. If I say one word, Hannah stops coming to this kitchen, and there is no lawyer in this county who can hand me back a Tuesday. So I make the triangles. I check her G’s. I put a star on every page she brings me, and the ones with my name on them I keep.

The young man from the recorder’s office called me back this morning. He had looked up the notary himself, three counties over.

“Notaries have to keep a book,” he said. “Every person who sits down in front of them. The date, the signature, and what they showed him to prove who they were. His office opens Monday at nine. You can stand right there and read that line with your own eyes.”

“I’ll be there at nine,” I said.

If that line says what I believe it says, then somebody carried my pocketbook into a building three counties over and came back out of it owning the house Gene put a roof on. If it says something else, then a person I have not thought of yet sat down in that chair and wrote my name.

Hannah came this afternoon and climbed up at the end of the table where the light is good. She had a page for me already folded in half in her lunch bag, and she kept her chin on my arm while I opened it.

“Don’t be mad,” she said. “Mommy says this one is the last one. She says after this one you won’t have to worry about the house anymore.”

I looked down at the paper. It was a formal document, a transfer of interest, and the signature line at the bottom was already filled in with my name. It was a perfect copy, far better than her usual practice work.

“Did you write this, Hannah?” I asked, my voice steady despite the thrumming in my chest.

“I traced it,” she said, pointing to a faint graphite outline beneath the ink. “Mommy put the light under the glass table and told me to be very, very careful.”

I felt the blood drain from my face. I looked at the kitchen door, wondering if Kelsey was listening from the hallway.

“Did Mommy say why?” I asked.

“She said you’re going to a place where you don’t need a kitchen,” Hannah whispered. “She said it’s a surprise.”

I took a long, slow breath. I folded the paper and tucked it into my apron pocket, right next to the church cookbook.

“Thank you for showing me, sweetheart,” I said, leaning down to kiss her forehead. “Why don’t you go play in the living room for a bit while I finish the dishes?”

She ran off, her sneakers squeaking on the linoleum. I didn’t wash a single dish. I walked to the phone and dialed the number for the sheriff’s office, the one I’d memorized years ago when Gene was still here to answer it.

“I need to report a forgery,” I told the dispatcher. “And I have the evidence sitting on my kitchen table.”

Monday morning, I was at the notary’s office exactly at nine. The notary was an older man with thick glasses who looked confused when I showed him my driver’s license and the deed. He pulled out his ledger, flipping through the pages until he reached the entry for March 14.

“There it is,” he muttered, pointing to a line. “March 14. A woman came in. Mid-forties, blonde hair, blue dress.”

“That’s not me,” I said, pointing to my own gray hair and the date on my license.

The notary went pale. “She had a purse. She said it was her mother’s ID. I didn’t think to look closely at the photo.”

I didn’t say another word. I left the ledger open on his desk, walked out to my car, and drove straight to the courthouse. The young man at the recorder’s office was waiting for me. We spent the next three hours filing the copies of the school visitor log, the notary’s fraudulent entry, and a statement detailing the pressure Brett and Kelsey had put on me regarding the house.

By the time I drove home, the sun was low. I saw Brett’s truck in the driveway. He was standing on the porch, looking at his phone. When he saw me pull up, he walked down to the car.

“Mom, what are you doing?” he asked, his voice tight. “We’ve been looking for you all day.”

I turned off the ignition and stepped out of the car. I didn’t reach for my purse. I just looked at him, seeing the lines around his eyes that he got from his father.

“I went to the courthouse, Brett,” I said. “And I went to see the notary three counties over.”

He went still. “Mom, don’t.”

“The police are on their way,” I said. “They want to talk to you and Kelsey about a house that doesn’t belong to you.”

He started to argue, his voice rising, but I walked past him toward the front door. I didn’t look back when the cruiser pulled into the drive. I walked into the kitchen and sat down at the table where the light was good. I pulled the church cookbook out and set it in front of me.

I opened the cover and looked at the stack of papers. The practice pages, the tax statement, and the copy of my signature from the day Hannah got sick. I sat there in the quiet of my own home, waiting for the knock on the door, knowing that for the first time in months, the house was finally mine again.