I slowly reached out and took the pen with my left hand, purposely letting my fingers shake violently.
“Okay, I will sign the papers,” I whispered softly.
The three of them smiled in unison, matching each other’s triumphant expressions.
As Mark slid the documents closer to me, I remembered the very last piece of advice my grandmother had whispered to me in her hospital bed.
“Sometimes, sweetheart, to catch a cruel person, you must let them believe they have already won,” she had told me.
I signed the papers slowly and deliberately, writing my name in a specific way.
Yasmin snatched the sheets of paper immediately, hugging them to her chest as if she had won a grand lottery.
“You finally understood your place in this family,” she spat.
But that signature was not a true surrender, because it was actually a secret distress signal that my grandmother and I had prepared to prove coercion.
