The moment I pressed the phone to my ear, Renata’s voice came out fast and shaking. “Marcus, what did you do? What did you tell the bank?” I said nothing at first. I let the silence sit, because for once I had the full picture and she did not. The night before, my mother had spread that folded statement across her lap, and I had seen the four highlighted entries with my own eyes. Four transfers. Four withdrawals from her savings account that she had never approved, each one landing in Renata’s boutique account over the past year.

“Answer me,” Renata snapped, though the anger underneath it sounded a lot like fear. I heard a chair scrape, a drawer slam, her breathing too quick. “They froze everything. The account, the cards, all of it. They’re saying fraud, Marcus. Fraud.” I closed my eyes. My mother had told me she was hoping she was wrong. She wasn’t. And that was the exact moment the front door opened, and Preston, my mother’s lawyer, stepped into my kitchen holding a thick brown envelope with my name written across the front.