The title company told me the property in Nixa had been under contract for six weeks. The buyer had already wired the earnest money. I asked them to read the seller information back to me. My name, my old mailing address, and a signature that looked enough like mine to make my stomach turn. I told them I’d never owned property in Nixa. The woman put me on hold, then came back and said the closing file contained a trust document referencing the same account where I’d kept the farm money since 2019. Someone had been moving money out of that account for months.
I confronted my husband with the closing statement. He didn’t deny knowing about the property. He said Cole had found an investment opportunity and needed a way to get started after losing his job. I asked why he had been meeting a realtor and why he needed the password to my tablet. He said he was trying to “fix things before I had to worry about them.” Then I asked how he had signed my name on the trust paperwork. He finally admitted the missing page had been removed because my signature was already on it. He claimed I’d signed it years ago when we were organizing my father’s estate. I knew that wasn’t true. My father had left the farm proceeds to me personally, and I’d never created a trust for them.
The next morning I called the title company and told them the seller signature was unauthorized. They immediately stopped the closing. Then the escrow officer asked me whether I recognized the buyer’s name. I didn’t. She said the buyer was an LLC created three months earlier, and the registered agent was the same realtor my husband had been meeting every Thursday. I asked who was behind the LLC. She hesitated before saying, “Ma’am, your husband isn’t listed.” Then she read me the two names that were. One was Cole. The other was my husband’s name. I looked at the missing trust page again and realized the page hadn’t been removed to hide my signature. It had been removed because the beneficiary section was still attached to it — and my husband had already transferred the farm money into that trust.
