My mother looked like she might be physically ill.
“Maggie, you don’t understand how complicated these things are. We did our best. We made some mistakes. But we were trying to secure a better future for all of us.”
“For all of us,” I repeated. “You mean for yourselves.”
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The Investigation That Revealed the Full Scale of What Had Been Done
That evening, I drove to my grandmother’s house in the hills above the city, still in my graduation dress, the apartment I’d shared for two years echoing and empty behind me.
She spread financial documents across her dining room table like a general planning a campaign. Thai food cooled at the far end, forgotten. I poured wine and started reading.
The trust fund had been established the day I was born, funded initially with two million dollars from the sale of one of Vivien’s commercial properties. By careful investment, it had grown to $3.2 million by my twenty-first birthday. Then my parents became the only signatories.
Six months later, the balance had dropped to $2.8 million.
The withdrawals were vague in their notations — “investment opportunities,” “business ventures,” “consulting fees” — nothing specific, nothing easily traced. But the pattern was unmistakable.
“Your father,” my grandmother said, pointing to a cluster of transactions, “invested four hundred thousand dollars in a pharmaceutical startup about three years ago. One of his clients turned business partner. The company went under last year. Complete loss.”
She kept going. Another three hundred thousand in a real estate flip my mother had organized with friends — bought at auction, renovated, sold at a loss. A restaurant investment. Cryptocurrency speculation. A medical device company that turned out to be outright fraud.
“How much is left?” I asked, though something in her expression had already told me the answer was going to be bad.
