"Priya."
"There's a deed," Priya said. "Recorded June third. An interspousal transfer grant deed. From Nora Castellano Hollis, a married woman as her sole and separate property, to Grant Hollis and Nora Hollis, husband and wife as community property with right of survivorship." She turned the screen so Nora could see the index entry. "You put him on title, Nora. According to the county, you gave him half your house. And right of survivorship means if anything happened to you—"
"I didn't." Nora's voice rose. She heard Bev in her head, no getting upset, and pushed it down. "I didn't. I never signed anything like that. I would remember."
"Would you? You signed fifteen documents in four months, at night, after work, pregnant, while your husband explained what each one was and your mother stamped them." Priya's voice wasn't unkind. "That's not your fault. That's what they were counting on."
They. Nora looked at the screen. In the recorder's index there was no image of the document itself, just a line of text, but at the end of the line there was a code: the notary's commission number, entered when the deed was recorded.
She knew that number. She'd seen it a hundred times on the round black face of her mother's stamp.
* * *
That night she couldn't sleep, and at three in the morning she was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the nursery with the mobile her father had made turning slowly over her head in the draft from the vent, and her own laptop balanced on what remained of her lap, and she was doing what she had always done when something frightened her—what she did when a seven-year-old at school told her something about home that made her stomach drop. She was reading.
She read the California Government Code until the words started to swim. She read the Secretary of State's notary public handbook, all of it, a hundred and some pages. She read about acknowledgments and jurats, about sequential journals, about satisfactory evidence of identity. And at three-forty she read a sentence that made her sit up so straight the baby kicked in protest.
A notary public in California who notarizes a deed, quitclaim deed, or deed of trust affecting real property must require the party signing the document to place a right thumbprint in the notary's journal.
She closed her eyes and went back to the night in May.
It had been a Wednesday. She knew because she'd had yard duty that day and her feet had been killing her. Diane had come at seven in her navy blazer and set her case on the dining table, and Grant had put the stack in front of Nora and said, "Okay, this one's the big one, the power of attorney, and then a couple of related pages," and he'd flipped—she could see his hands doing it—flipped quickly through, saying, "Sign, sign, initial, sign," and she'd been looking at him and not at the paper because he'd been telling her a funny story about a client who'd tried to pay his closing costs with a check written on a paper plate.
And her mother had opened the journal and slid over the little ink pad. "Thumb, sweetie," she'd said. "New rules for powers of attorney. They're very strict now."