Derek returned the next afternoon, exhausted and devastated that he had missed Clara’s birth.
His father was stable, but still in intensive care.
I handed him my phone.
He read every message without speaking.
Then he reached the bank alert and looked up at me.
“What are you going to do?”
For once, I did not say I would handle it quietly.
“I’m going to find out how much she took.”
Through my employer’s legal-assistance program, I contacted an attorney named Nina Patel.
She pulled probate records, account records, and documents from the safe-deposit box my father had opened before he died.
Inside that box was a sealed folder with my name on it.
The folder contained the trust holding my mother’s house.
The house was not hers.
