She told me that the civil question — the question of the debt — was separate from any criminal question, and that the lender’s investigation was primarily about the civil question. She told me that criminal process, if it came to that, was not something I controlled and was not something that I needed to initiate or manage. She told me to document, to follow the lender’s process, and to come back to her if the lender’s investigation did not resolve in my favor.
She also told me something that I have returned to many times, which is that the documentation I had was more complete than most people in my situation have when they come to see her. The FTC report, the case number, the written communications I had initiated with the lender, the notes I had kept on every phone conversation — these were good. She said that many people she saw had lost months doing things that didn’t build their case because they didn’t know where to start. I had started in the right place and had kept going.
I don’t know if I would have been as systematic without Tessa’s early advice to document everything. I don’t know if I would have found the correct resources without the credit monitoring service I had mostly forgotten about. The good outcomes in this process — the documentation, the rental application’s eventual resolution, the lender’s findings — were built on a series of small prior decisions that I had made without knowing they would matter in this specific way. That is how a lot of the things that go right actually work, I think. Not strategy so much as the accumulation of reasonable choices.