I picked up the document, the thick plastic of the evidence bag crinkling under my fingers.
At the bottom of the final page, in the official signature block, my name was written in dark blue ink.
The letters were perfectly formed, the long sweeping line of the capital D matching my handwriting exactly, even down to the small, precise dot I always left inside the lower loop.
It was a perfect replica.
The knock on my apartment door came at twenty past seven the next morning, before the kitchen faucet had stopped dripping.
I opened it to find a short man in a salt-stained nylon jacket holding a clipboard and a thick manila envelope. He had a smudge of blue ink on his thumb and did not look me in the eye.
“David Miller?” he asked, his voice flat with the indifference of someone who delivered bad news for a living.
I nodded, and he slid the envelope into my hand before I could ask who had sent him.
“You have been served,” he said, turning back toward the stairs without waiting for a signature.
I pulled the stapled documents from the envelope and leaned against the cold wood of the doorframe.
The first page bore the blue stamp of the Kings County Supreme Court, listing my engineering firm as the primary defendant in a civil suit.
A homeowner named Arthur Vance was suing me for eighty-five thousand dollars, alleging that my company had taken his deposit for a foundation stabilization project and abandoned the work.
I had never heard of Arthur Vance, but my name was written on the contract in bold black ink, directly above the forged signature I had stared at the night before.
The document claimed that I had personally visited his home in Flatbush on the second of November, a date when I was still working twelve-hour shifts at the refinery in Munich.
The phone in my pocket began to vibrate against my leg, the screen displaying an unknown number from a local area code.
I did not answer it, choosing instead to pack my briefcase with the legal papers and head straight to the hospital.
At the hospital, the fourth-floor corridor smelled of floor wax and green tea. I passed the nurses’ station, where three women in blue scrubs were whispering while looking at a desktop monitor.
One of them looked up as I walked by, her eyes lingering on my face before she quickly turned back to her screen.
I pushed open the door to room 412, where the quiet room was illuminated by the low gray light of the winter morning.
