"When I opened the door to the mountain lodge I had spent years earning, my sister was standing beside my fireplace with a champagne glass raised, welcoming two dozen people to “her new Christmas place.” My mother saw me first. She didn’t look surprised that Olivia was lying. She looked worried that I had arrived in time to hear it.

They hadn't just come to throw a party. They had come to take the ground beneath my feet.

I sat on the cold floor of the crawl space, the smell of cutting oil sharp in my nostrils, holding that bogus power of attorney.

It was crude. It was desperate. But in the hands of an unethical notary and a predatory title company, an "incapacity" filing could cloud a title for eighteen months. In Colorado, if a lis pendens—a notice of pending litigation—is filed against a property, the owner cannot sell, cannot refinance, and cannot secure a construction loan until the suit is adjudicated.

Jason didn't want the house to live in. He wanted the title clouded so he could force a partition sale, tie up the equity in court, and use the perceived ownership to collateralize his loans for the Lyons project. He was drowning, and he was using my life as his life preserver.

My phone rang again. It wasn't the office. It was a local number with a Ridgway exchange.

"Rebecca?"

The voice was rough, gravelly, belonging to a man who had smoked two packs of Camels a day since the Ford administration.

"Frank," I said, recognizing Frank Miller, the town surveyor and one of the three men who had poured the lodge’s grade beam with me. "What’s going on?"

"You got trouble down at the county building," Frank said bluntly. "I’m having coffee across from the clerk’s office. Your sister and that slick-haired boy from Boulder just walked in with old man Higgins. You know Higgins?"

"The disbarred probate lawyer from Delta?"

"The very same. He’s carrying a blue-backed filing folder. They’re trying to record something against your parcel before the holiday closure at noon. The clerk, Mary-Ann, is stalling them because she knows your daddy’s name from the Legion, but she can't hold 'em off forever if the paperwork’s got a seal on it."

"Tell Mary-Ann I’m coming down," I said. "And Frank?"

"Yeah, girl?"

"Call Sean Crawford. Tell him to meet me at the courthouse steps with his body camera on."

I didn't bother changing out of my wool shirt and work pants. I pulled on my heavy snow boots, grabbed the original title binder from the kitchen drawer, and took my keys.

When I stepped out onto the porch, the storm had broken. The San Juans were emerging from the mist like white teeth against a slate-gray sky. The air was thirty degrees colder than it had been at dawn—the kind of brittle, blue-cold that makes the snow squeak like dry styrofoam under your tires.

I put the Subaru in four-wheel low and dropped off the ridge.

The switchbacks were sheets of corrugated ice. The snowplows had carved a single, narrow trench through the drifts on Red Mountain, the walls of white standing six feet high on either side of the highway. At the Bear Creek bridge, where the gorge drops eight hundred feet straight down into black water and jagged slate, I passed Jason’s Audi.

It was abandoned in the turnout.

The front bumper was cracked, the low-profile continental tires half-buried in a drift where he had clearly spun out trying to navigate the ruts without chains. He had been forced to hitch a ride down into Ouray with one of his guests.

A mile outside town, my phone chimed with a text message from an unknown number.

*“Becca. It’s Olivia. We need to talk before this goes any further. Meet me at the True Grit Café in Ridgway. Just you and me. No lawyers. No cops. If you go to the clerk’s office, Jason will release the filings and your career in insurance is over. We have friends at the state regulatory board. Let’s handle this like sisters.”*