Inside was a letter from my mother, dated 2011, and the first line made me stop breathing for a second: “I know you think he takes care of everything, but you need to know what he did with the house.” I read it twice before I could keep going. She wrote that she’d discovered something while helping me sort through our old family papers, and she’d been afraid to tell me because my husband had already warned her to stay out of our marriage.
The letter included a copy of a property document I’d never seen. My mother’s handwriting circled a name on the page — my husband’s — and beside it she’d written, “Ask him why this was transferred.” The transfer date was 2009, and the property description matched the small house my mother had left me when she died.
I called my attorney from the gas station and read the letter to her. She asked me to bring the envelope in immediately. Then she told me something that made me grip the steering wheel: the house had been sold three years after my mother died, but the proceeds had never appeared anywhere in our marital records. And now we knew exactly where to start looking.
