About four months in, Luke and I had a longer conversation — the kind we don’t have often, where we talked for almost two hours about things we don’t usually talk about.
He told me, in that conversation, more of what our mother had told him in the weeks after the discovery. He told me she had described it to him initially as a “misunderstanding with a loan,” not specifying that the loan was in my name. He told me she had described my response as “overreacting” and as “going straight to authorities without even talking to me.”
He also told me she had, at some point, told him that I had always been “difficult about money” and “territorial about my credit” in a way that suggested the dispute was about some longstanding tension between us rather than about a $28,000 unauthorized debt.
I listened to all of this and I did not say what I was thinking immediately, which was: the way she has framed this to you is itself a continuation of the thing that created the original problem, which is that what other people think is more important to her than what’s accurate.
What I did say was: “What did you say to her when she said that?”
He said: “At the time, I believed her version more than I understood what was actually going on. That’s what I’m trying to be honest with you about.”
I said: “And now?”
He said: “Now I’ve read what you sent me. And I’ve thought about it. And I think she took out a loan in your name without telling you and then was hoping you’d either never find out or that by the time you did, it would be paid off and she could explain it as a thing that happened and got handled.”