“By pretending to be me?” I asked.
“I did what mothers do!”
Ethan spoke quietly from beside the girls. “You made a decision for her and misrepresented it.” When Mom said this was family business, he rested an arm around Grace. “So am I.”
Ryan put the folder on the island. “Then explain this.”
The bank statements covered almost four years. After the landscaping company failed, Mom had told him the estate overpaid him and that I demanded repayment of my portion.
“I’ve been paying it back,” he said. “Two hundred here, five hundred there. Tax refunds. My warehouse bonus. Whatever we could spare.”
Kelsey looked at the pages. “We skipped vacations for two years.”
Mom told Ryan to stop, but he pointed to the recipient: M. Whitmore Restoration Account. For a moment, I wondered whether she had quietly been repairing what she had done.
Then I recognized the routing number. Nora and my attorney had shown it to me two weeks earlier; the account belonged solely to Diane.
“How much?” I asked.
“About seventy-eight thousand.” Ryan swallowed. “I thought I was paying you back.”
I looked at those ordinary amounts, saved from ordinary paychecks, and felt my anger change shape. For years, I had believed he never returned a cent, while he believed I had been collecting it.
Mom backed away from the island, saying there had been taxes, expenses, legal fees. Neither of us looked away from her this time.
Chapter 3/5
The payments began six weeks after Ryan’s company closed. Every month or two, he sent money to Mom while she kept telling each of us a different story about the other.
“Your father left me with a mess,” she said.
“Dad left paperwork.”
She placed one hand hard against the island. For forty years, she said, Dad had controlled every dollar; every purchase required discussion, and every card statement became an interrogation.
I listened without pretending I knew everything about their marriage. But unhappiness didn’t explain the false signature or why she had let me believe my father chose to take my inheritance away.
Kelsey asked whose handwriting appeared on the disputed document. Mom looked at her, then sank onto a stool.