The house felt very cold now.

I reached out and began to unwind the string.

I pulled the stack of papers out of the envelope.

The documents were thick, printed on heavy white paper.

At the top of the first page, the words “Easement and Settlement Agreement” were printed in bold black ink.

I flipped past the first few pages of standard legal language.

I wanted to see the financial details.

I wanted to see where the fifty thousand dollars was coming from.

Underneath the main agreement, there was a secondary packet of documents.

These papers looked different.

They were not standard court filings.

They were financial statements, bank letters, and corporate registration documents.

Many of them had Trevor’s personal signature at the bottom.

Some of them had blue ink annotations in the margins, written in a hurried hand.

I began to read the first page of the secondary packet.

It was a loan application for an entity called “Ridgeview Lodges LLC.”

I had never heard of Ridgeview Lodges LLC.

Kelsey had always referred to the project as “Pike Development.”