## The Version of Events
Over the weeks following the initial confrontation, I became aware that there were multiple versions of what had happened circulating in the world, and that only one of them was mine.
My mother’s version, as I understood it from what Luke told me and from the fragments of conversation I had with her directly, went something like this: She had been in a financial bind. She had tried to handle it herself. She had used some old information that she thought she could manage temporarily. She had been making the payments and intended to resolve it before I needed to know. My finding out was an accident, and my response to finding out — initiating a dispute, filing with the FTC — was disproportionate and was going to cause consequences that could have been avoided if I had just talked to her first.
The internal logic of this version was not incoherent. It had a shape: problem, solution, accident, overreaction. If you believed that version, you would probably think I had handled this badly.
My version was different in some critical ways. My version: an account had been opened in my name without my knowledge or consent. I had found it through a legitimate monitoring service. I had verified it through the correct channels before contacting anyone in my family. I had then contacted my brother, then my mother, then continued the process I had already correctly started. I had not waited to contact the lender, because the lender was the entity that had issued the loan in my name and was the correct entity to begin the dispute process with. None of what I had done was disproportionate. All of it was the appropriate response to discovering an unauthorized account.