## Luke at the Threshold
About two months in, Luke called me again, and this call was different.
He opened with: “I went and looked at the credit report thing. What you sent me.”
I had sent him the basic outline of what I’d found, weeks ago, when I was still trying to loop him in. He hadn’t said much about it at the time.
He said: “Twenty-eight thousand dollars, Erin.”
I said: “Yes.”
He said: “On your credit report.”
I said: “Yes.”
He said: “And you didn’t know.”
I said: “No. I didn’t know.”
There was a silence, and in the silence I could feel him doing the thing he did — adjusting, recalibrating, lining up what he had been told by our mother against what he was now seeing in the actual documentation.
He said: “She told me you found out about a loan and you immediately filed a report without talking to her.”
I said: “I initiated a dispute with the lender. I filed with the FTC. And then I called you, and then I called her.”
He said: “That’s not what she said the order was.”
I said: “I know.”
Another silence. Then: “She also told me the loan was basically paid off and that it wasn’t going to affect you.”
I said: “Luke, it’s on my credit report. It affected my rental application. It’s sitting on my report as an open account. Whether or not payments have been made doesn’t change that it’s there, in my name, and I didn’t consent to it.”