It stated that because of “household restructuring,” my lease would be amended to include Daniel as primary tenant and Carol Whitaker as an approved long-term occupant.
At the bottom, there was a line for my signature.
The letterhead was fake. The phone number was wrong. The wording was clumsy.
But Daniel stood across from me with a pen in his hand.
“Sign it,” he said.
“It’s just paperwork.”
I looked at him and saw, finally, not the man I had married, but the man who had been waiting until the wedding made me easier to pressure.
“No,” I said.
His face hardened. “Then maybe this marriage was a mistake.”
Carol, sitting at the table with her coffee, smiled as if she had been waiting for him to say it.
I put the papers back into the envelope and went to bed. But I did not sleep.
