I said: “Yes.”
She said: “Okay. So you need to keep going.”
The thing about Tessa that I have always valued, and never more than in the months that followed, is that she does not dress things up. She did not say “I’m so sorry” or “how could she do that” in the way that emphasizes emotion at the expense of the next step. She acknowledged that this was hard and then she moved directly to what needed to happen next. I needed both of those things in exactly that order.
She also said: “You should probably talk to a financial counselor or an attorney who knows identity theft. Not because you’ve done anything wrong, but because you need individual guidance that’s specific to your situation. I don’t know enough to tell you what the right moves are from here.”
That was exactly right. She was not wrong. She was also not a miracle — she was a practical friend who was helping me think through a situation that required professional guidance at some point. I appreciated that she knew the difference.
## Luke Calls Me Back
My brother called me three days later. In the three days in between, I had not called him with an update, because I was still processing and because I was fairly certain, based on how our first conversation had gone, that my mother had talked to him in the interim.
I was right.
He led with: “Mom called me.”
I said: “I figured.”
He said: “She’s really upset, Erin. She’s –” And then he stopped, and I could hear him adjusting, the way he adjusts when he starts a sentence from her perspective and then remembers he’s supposed to be talking to me. “She said you filed a report.”