Every time my brother-in-law drove me home, I would black out and wake up sore. My husband just laughed and said I was out of shape. After the fourth trip, I hid a voice recorder in my purse — and that night I heard a phone call that made me realize the blackouts had never been accidents.

And that is why no marks.

Not because a mark is cruel. Because a notary who is being paid to look the other way can look the other way about a woman who is unwell and being helped by her husband and her brother-in-law —

and cannot look the other way about a woman with a mark on her face.

Four documents. One for each appointment.

Taken together, those four documents move the whole of my forty per cent of my father’s company into a holding vehicle.

Esteban incorporated it in the January of last year — two months before the first appointment.

He is the sole director of it. There is nobody else on it at all.

Three of the four are executed and filed.

The fourth was signed on the twenty-ninth of April, in that office, by a woman who was not awake — and it had not been filed.

They were eleven days away from owning the whole of it.