The Commission

Chapter 2 — The Addendum

The offices of Cole Development Group occupied the top two floors of a glass tower on Camelback Road, and the elevator ride up felt, to Diana, like ascending into weather. The receptionist — twenty-two, cheekbones like architecture — offered her sparkling water in a glass bottle. Diana took it. Her mouth was dry.

Preston Cole did not come to funding meetings. Diana knew that; everyone in the Scottsdale luxury market knew that. Closings were theater, and Preston liked theater. Fundings were plumbing, and Preston hired plumbers. So she was not surprised when Howard Pryce walked into the conference room instead — she was only surprised by how much she disliked him on sight.

Pryce was sixtyish, thin as a letter opener, with the still, dry manner of a man who had never once raised his voice and had never once needed to. He set a leather folio on the table, opened it with two fingers, and smiled at Diana the way a cat smiles at a door it knows how to open.

“Ms. Voss. Congratulations on the Saguaro House. Preston speaks very highly of your work.”

“Thank you. I’m here for the wire.”

“Of course.” Pryce slid a single sheet of paper across the polished table. “Before we process the disbursement, I need you to acknowledge the executed commission addendum. Just a formality — sign here, confirming receipt.”

Diana looked down at the paper.

COMMISSION ADJUSTMENT ADDENDUM, it said, in the bland, bloodless typeface of legal documents everywhere. Pursuant to the listing agreement dated March 3rd… the parties agree that the total commission payable to the listing brokerage shall be adjusted to a flat fee of FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS ($50,000.00)… in consideration of revised marketing expenditures and extended days on market…

Her eyes dropped to the signature line. And stopped.

There was her name. Diana Voss. In her handwriting — the looping D, the slash through the double s, the little upward flick on the final stroke that she had been doing since she was sixteen and signing yearbooks.

She had never signed this document. Not in March, not ever. She had never seen it before in her life.

“I don’t understand,” she said, and hated how small her voice sounded in the big glass room. “This isn’t — I didn’t sign this.”

Pryce’s smile didn’t move. “You signed it at the pre-listing meeting, Ms. Voss. March third. Preston’s conference room, right down the hall. You don’t remember?”

“I remember the pre-listing meeting. I signed the listing agreement. Six percent, split with the buyer’s side — my net five. This — ” She held up the paper. Her hand was shaking, and she hated that too. “This is not my signature.”

“It is a remarkably good likeness, then,” Pryce said pleasantly, “for a signature you didn’t make.”

“Where’s the original?”

“In our files.”

“I want to see it. And I want the metadata — the scan logs, the email chain, whatever system you used. If I signed this in March, there will be a record of it being sent to me.”

“Ms. Voss.” Pryce folded his hands. “Let me save us both some time. The addendum is executed. It is binding. The fifty thousand dollars is generous — it is more than most agents see in a year, and you will receive it today, wired within the hour. If you wish to dispute the document’s authenticity, you are of course free to retain counsel.” He paused. “”Preston asked me to convey his personal regards. And his advice, for what it’s worth: take the fifty. Litigation is so… wearing. Especially for a single mother.”

“Is that a threat, Mr. Pryce?”

“A threat?” Pryce looked genuinely surprised, the way a shark might look surprised at being called a fish. “Ms. Voss, I don’t make threats. I make predictions. There’s a difference, and the difference is billable.””

The smirk arrived then — small, precise, practiced. It sat on Howard Pryce’s face like a signature of its own.

Diana stared at the addendum. Fifty thousand dollars. Not six hundred. Fifty. The credit cards, the mortgage, Leo’s tuition, the college account — she watched the whole bright future she had built on Sunday night collapse like a house of cards in a wind tunnel, and underneath the shock something else was rising, something hot and clean and unfamiliar.

Rage. Not the helpless kind. The kind with a spine.

“I’m taking a copy of this,” she said.

“Of course. We insist.”

She stood. Her legs worked. That surprised her. She walked to the door of the conference room, and then she stopped, and she turned back.

“Tell Preston something for me,” she said.

Pryce raised his eyebrows.

“Tell him I know what my own signature looks like.”

The elevator ride down felt like descending into a different kind of weather. In the parking garage, Diana sat in her Tahoe with the engine off and held the addendum up to the thin light coming through the concrete slats. She studied the signature the way she had once studied contour maps in a college geology class — the pressure of the pen, the angle of the loops, the flick at the end.

It was good. It was very good. Whoever had done this hadn’t traced her signature. They had practiced it.

That was the thing she couldn’t stop thinking about, all the way home. Not the money — the money was a wound, and wounds could be counted. It was the practice. Somewhere, someone had sat with a pen and a stack of paper and written her name over and over until it looked like hers.

You don’t practice a signature for a fifty-thousand-dollar haircut, Diana thought, pulling into her driveway. You practice it because you’ve done this before.

And you do it because you’re planning to do it again.

She called Rosa before she turned off the engine.

“Tell me you have a check,” Rosa said.

“I have a piece of paper that says I agreed to fifty thousand dollars.” Diana’s voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well. “With my signature on it. That I never signed.”

Silence. Then Rosa, very quietly: “That’s fraud, Diana.”

“Yes.”

“So what do we do?”

Diana looked at the addendum lying on the passenger seat, the practiced signature glowing in the garage light. “We go home,” she said. “And then we figure out how to prove it.”