Chapter 14 - The Shredder
The police arrived before Mom could destroy everything.
They didn’t arrest her.
Not that night.
But they collected the bag after Dad handed it over voluntarily.
Mom called me a traitor.
Dad called me nothing.
Melanie posted a vague message online about “toxic relatives who use money to control people.”
I didn’t respond.
For once, silence was useful.
Two days later, Greg called me into his office.
The fraud investigator had reconstructed enough of the shredded documents to identify several accounts.
One was a credit card I knew about.
One was the personal loan.
One was the forged lease.
And one was completely new.
A home-equity application.
I stared at him.
“They don’t own the house.”
“Correct.”
“So how could they apply for equity?”
“They didn’t use that house.”
He slid a photocopy across the desk.
The property listed was a small duplex in Ohio.
The address looked familiar.
Then I remembered.
My grandmother’s duplex.
She had died eight years earlier.
Mom always said it had been sold to pay medical bills.
Greg tapped the owner line.
“Aaron, according to the county records, you own half of this property.”
I stared at him.
“No, I don’t.”
“You inherited it.”
“No one told me.”
“Your grandmother’s will did.”
He handed me another document.
My grandmother had left half the duplex to Mom.
Half to me.
Mom had been collecting rent from both units for eight years.
My half had never reached me.
I could barely speak.
“How much?”
“We don’t know yet.”
Greg leaned back.
“But there’s more.”
Of course there was.
He showed me the equity application.
Mom had attempted to borrow against the duplex.
To do that, she needed my consent as co-owner.
So there was another signature.
Mine.
Dated six months earlier.
The loan had been rejected because of a title issue.
I stared at my forged name.
Christmas no longer mattered.
The cake. The door. The insults.
They were just the match.
The fire had been burning for years.
Then Greg said, “We pulled the rental history.”
I looked up.
“How much?”
He turned the page toward me.
May you like
My share of collected rent was approximately seventy-three thousand dollars.
And not one dollar had ever been given to me.
