Mr. Rosenberg sent a photo of the paper Gloria was holding, and it was a court order with a judges name on it, filed three days before I even signed my lease, which is how I knew, sitting in a Chicago conference room, that it was not a court order at all. It was a forgery, and a clumsy one.
The Baltimore police met Gloria and her locksmith in my hallway. The locksmith, God bless him, had already stopped the moment my landlord told him to. When the officers looked at Glorias court order and saw it was dated before my tenancy existed, and then saw the letter with a signature I never signed, they stopped treating it as a landlord dispute and started treating it as fraud.
My former mother-in-law forged a letter and a court order to take an apartment I rented in my maiden name, and she found the address from my new health insurance card, which came in the mail to my ex-husbands house, because the one thread I forgot to cut led Gloria straight to a door she then tried to forge her way through.
For nineteen years, whenever Gloria overstepped, my ex-husband said thats just Mom, she means well. Meaning well does not forge a judges signature. That is a crime, and the police in my hallway agreed.
Mr. Rosenberg never let anyone in. The locks Gloria tried to change are still my locks. The forged order and the forged letter are with the police now, and a forged court document is not a family squabble, it is the kind of thing that follows a person into a real courtroom, the kind with a real judge.
I flew home from Chicago to an apartment that was still mine, in my name, my maiden name, the name I took back. I changed the locks anyway, on my terms, with a locksmith I hired, and I had the post office and the insurance company correct my address so nothing of mine ever routes through that house again.
She says she has a court order, Mr. Rosenberg had texted. She had a forgery, and forging your way into a womans home is how a mother-in-law who means well ends up explaining herself to a detective. I finally left that marriage. I was not about to let his mother move me back into it, one forged lock at a time.