On Christmas morning, my parents smiled and handed my sister a key…

By Saturday evening, we’d completed the checklist, helped Douglas lift storage bins in the garage, listened to Margaret complain about Jenna’s boyfriend, endured a dinner where every topic circled back to lake house renovations. By 10 p.m., I couldn’t sleep. The guest room, the one I used to call mine, still had my old soccer trophies on the shelf, like proof I’d been there once.

But the walls felt tighter now, like they remembered how many words I’d swallowed inside them. I wandered barefoot and quiet. The door to Douglas’s office was slightly ajar.

That alone was strange. He guarded the room like a church lights off blinds down locked drawers, passwords on everything. And yet there it was open.

The safe was tucked behind the file cabinet, small and gray, but unmistakably his. And for the first time in my life, the door hung loose. I should have closed it and walked away.

I should have assumed it was a mistake. But something held me there, some small tug in my gut that said, What do they keep locked from you that Jenna already knows? I knelt. Slowly.

Carefully. Inside were rows of manila folders all perfectly labeled. Tax returns.

Property deeds. Bank statements, some familiar, some new. I flipped through them in silence.

Then I found it. A sealed envelope, plain white, on the front in Douglas’s handwriting to be opened upon death. My hands went still.

Then I opened it. Inside a will. Not the one I remembered from years ago, the one they made a show of presenting at the dinner table when Jenna turned 21 where everything was split evenly.

This one was different. My name came first. Next to it, a parcel number.

A property I’d never heard them mention. At first I thought it was a mistake. But then I saw the next page, a deed.

Purchased under my name. Years ago. And below that, a signed authorization transferring funds using my name.

The signature was mine. But the slant was wrong. The curl in the R didn’t match.

My breath caught in my throat. Someone had signed for me. And based on the bank activity attached, it hadn’t just happened once.

My name had been used. My identity moved around like furniture in a room I wasn’t allowed to enter. I sat there under the soft buzz of the desk lamp trying to piece it together.

It wasn’t just that they had kept something from me. It was that they had built a second narrative and written me into it without my consent. I didn’t say anything that weekend.

At breakfast the next morning, Margaret poured my coffee with her usual performative cheer, asked if I’d found a real job, yet then launched into a story about Jenna’s new podcast idea, something about lifestyle branding and authentic influence. Douglas barely looked up from his toast. I smiled, nodded, played the role they’d written for me years ago…