Brooke forced a smile. “It’s just paperwork. Ethan said you signed everything weeks ago. The deed transfer. Remember those documents at the kitchen table?”
And suddenly, Lorraine did remember. The papers. The way Ethan rushed her. Told her it was just to keep things organized, to protect the house if anything happened to her.
She had trusted him.
Before Lorraine could speak again, Brooke slipped back inside and locked the door. Lorraine stood there for several minutes, then slowly walked down the steps, the chicken tucked against her chest like something fragile. Ethan hadn’t just taken her house. He had taken her certainty. And somewhere deep inside, Lorraine began to remember who she was.
Years earlier, in 1997, Lorraine was a night nurse at Riverbend Medical Center in Mobile, Alabama. She had lost two pregnancies and accepted that motherhood might never come. Then one night, a toddler arrived with a broken wrist—thin, silent, abandoned by a foster parent who never came back.
His name was Ethan.
Lorraine didn’t plan to adopt. But the child clung to her scrubs and refused to let go. Two months later, she filed the papers. Six months after that, Ethan had her last name.