“Just hold on, dear,” Howard replied. “Think about all the money. Once it’s ours, we’ll never have to work another day.”
My hands were trembling.
The next day was the final hearing.
Denise arrived dressed to the nines. “Let’s settle this quickly. My daughter, Vicky, and I have a busy day.”
But there was one thing Denise didn’t know.
When I’d crouched under that window, my phone had been recording the whole time.
PART 2
I need to explain the money, because the money is the whole reason Denise showed up at all.
My parents weren’t rich, exactly. But my father had been careful in the quiet way careful people are. There was a life insurance policy — a large one — and the house, and some savings. After they died, it added up to a significant amount.
All of it was left in trust. For Vicky and me.
Specifically: the trust named a guardian who would control the funds until Vicky turned eighteen.
And that’s the part Denise understood better than I did, at first.
Whoever became Vicky’s legal guardian didn’t just get to raise her. They got control of a trust worth enough that Howard, as I’d heard through that window, would “never have to work another day.”
Denise and Howard didn’t want a little girl.
They wanted a bank account with a child attached, and they were willing to ship the actual child off to boarding school the moment they had the paperwork.
I was nineteen. I had two jobs and a flat bike tire and a seven-year-old who cried every time she came back from their house. On paper, I looked like exactly what Denise told child services I was: an overwhelmed kid in over his head.
And for three months, that story had been winning.
