For fifteen years I thought Nora and I were fine, right up until her father’s funeral. Within weeks she had moved his entire inheritance into her own account and stopped answering my calls, and I was left in a quiet house with nothing to plan for. Then a package turned up on my doormat, and after that came a letter from the bank.
1. The Page That Almost Made Me Pity Her
For fifteen years I was Nora’s stepmother. I married her father when she was seven, still small enough to need help with her seatbelt, and she never once called me Mom or Mama. That never stung. We swapped recipes, argued about films, sat through the same school concerts on the same folding chairs, and I told myself we had built something real out of nothing.
Then I sat at my kitchen table with a page in my hands and read the same paragraph four times over. For about three seconds I actually felt sorry for her. Three seconds was all she was getting. After what she had done, sympathy was a luxury I could not afford to hand out to anybody.