The loan, which had apparently been making payments for almost a year without my knowledge — or maybe not making them, I didn’t know yet — was showing on my report as an active account. The balance shown was not $28,000 anymore. It was lower, which meant either payments had been made or the principal had been structured differently than I understood, or — and this took me longer to consider — someone had been making payments on a debt they had taken out in my name in order to keep me from finding it on my credit report.
That thought arrived and then I sat with it for a while longer, and the coffee kept getting cold.
I want to be clear about something: I did not immediately think of my mother. I want to be honest about that because I think it matters for what came next, and because I don’t want to tell a story where I was secretly suspicious all along and this was just confirmation of something I already knew. I wasn’t. My first instinct was that this was a data-breach situation — that someone had gotten my information in one of the many data breaches that happen constantly and that I had been vaguely worried about in the abstract for years but had never taken specific steps to address.
Data breach was a coherent explanation. It was an impersonal explanation. I reached for it the way you reach for the explanation that doesn’t require your life to have gone sideways in the way you’re suddenly afraid it might have.