The second solicitor called me Tuesday morning and asked whether I had ever signed a personal indemnity for the salon lease. I said I had signed the guarantee, but nothing else. She told me to look at page seven of the copy she’d sent. There was a second signature underneath mine, and the wording beside it changed everything. It wasn’t another guarantor. It was an agreement making me personally responsible for every debt connected to the business, including debts created after the salon closed. I asked who had witnessed it. She gave me a name I recognized immediately — it was the same solicitor my daughter-in-law had told me was “just helping with the paperwork.”
I called my son and asked him whether he’d ever read the full guarantee. He said he hadn’t. Then I asked why his wife had told me the document was only temporary. He said that’s what she’d told him too. I reminded him that my house was now being threatened because of a business I’d never owned, never worked in, and never received a penny from. He went quiet and finally admitted that his wife had asked him to sign something three weeks after I signed the original paperwork. He thought it was an amendment to the lease. Then I asked him why his signature wasn’t anywhere on the copy I’d been given. He said he didn’t know.
The solicitor asked me to come into her office with the original documents. I brought everything I had. She compared the pages and found something even stranger. The page containing the personal indemnity wasn’t in the copy I had originally signed. It had been inserted afterward, but my signature had been copied onto it. The second solicitor said she could prove when the page was created because the notary’s log didn’t match the date printed on the document. Then she turned the last page toward me. There was a handwritten note from the landlord’s first solicitor: “Do not release security until personal indemnity is confirmed.” Underneath it was a name and a phone number. The number belonged to my daughter-in-law.
