I climbed the stairs to my mothball-scented room and sat on the edge of my narrow bed, staring at nothing. My mother had died in a car accident on black ice when I was four years old. I remembered her in fragments—the smell of her perfume, the sound of her laugh, the way she used to call me “little bird.” After she died, Lester had raised me with the help of his sister Vicki, who moved into our house and never left.
Growing up, I’d accepted that we didn’t have much money. Lester worked in insurance sales, and Vicki did bookkeeping from home. Meanwhile, Knox—Lester’s son from his first marriage—seemed to live in a different economic reality. New clothes, hockey gear, summer camps, a car when he turned sixteen. When I asked why things were different, Lester always said the same thing: “Knox’s mother pays child support. You think money grows on trees?”
I’d believed him. I’d felt guilty for wanting things. I’d worked my weekend job and saved every dollar, trying not to be a burden.
Now, sitting on my bed with the truth burning in my chest, I understood that guilt had been the point. Keep me small. Keep me grateful. Keep me from asking questions about money that was supposed to be mine all along.
That night, after everyone went to bed, I started searching. The house was old, full of creaking floorboards and spaces that had accumulated fifteen years of forgotten things. I started in the basement, moving quietly through boxes of old tax returns and files that smelled like mildew and dust.
I found it three hours later, tucked inside a banker’s box labeled “2008 Misc.” A manila folder, yellowed at the edges, containing documents that changed everything.
The first was a trust agreement dated two months before my mother died, establishing a fund for “Charity Margaret Chen” in the amount of three hundred twenty-five thousand dollars. The trustee listed was Lester James Frost. The beneficiary—me. The funds were designated for my education, health, and general welfare until age twenty-five, at which point any remaining balance would be distributed to me directly.
My hands shook as I read the name of the grantor: Reed Lawson.
Not Frost. Lawson.
The second document was a death certificate. Reed Thomas Lawson, died six months after my mother in a construction accident. No other family listed. Estate to be settled according to existing will and trust documents.
The third document made my vision blur: a DNA paternity test, dated three weeks before the trust was established. Probability of paternity: 99.97%. Father: Reed Thomas Lawson. Child: Charity Margaret Chen.
I sat on the cold basement floor, surrounded by boxes and fifteen years of lies, and understood with crystalline clarity that Lester wasn’t my father. He’d married my mother when I was two—I’d seen the wedding photos, me in a flower girl dress I didn’t remember wearing. He’d raised me after she died. He’d put his name on my school forms and my birth certificate amendment.
And he’d been stealing from me ever since.
The rest of the box contained bank statements. Withdrawals, regular and large, for things that had nothing to do with my education or welfare. A boat Lester sold three years later. Vicki’s new car. Knox’s hockey expenses, his summer camps, his college fund. Furniture. Vacations to places I’d never been invited to join. The Range Rover that sat in our driveway while I took the bus.
I photographed everything with my phone, hands shaking so badly some of the images came out blurred. Then I carefully returned everything to the box exactly as I’d found it, except for one document I slipped into my backpack: my mother’s death certificate, which listed her maiden name as Chen and her next of kin as “Reed Lawson, partner.”
Over the next three weeks, I became someone I didn’t recognize. During the day, I was the same quiet Charity who worked her grocery store shifts and did her homework and didn’t cause trouble. At night, I researched. I learned about trust law and fiduciary duty and embezzlement. I found legal aid clinics and websites about financial exploitation of minors. I printed articles and hid them in the bottom of my school locker.
And I made copies of everything in that basement box, storing them in a locked filing cabinet at the library where I volunteered, the one place I knew no one from my house would ever look.
Three days before my sixteenth birthday, I called the only lawyer whose number I could find in my mother’s old address book—a woman named Holly Brennan who’d apparently handled my mother’s estate.
“I’m calling about a trust,” I said when she answered, my voice steadier than I felt. “A trust that was set up for me by my biological father, and I think the trustee has been stealing from it.”
There was a long pause. “How old are you?”
“I’ll be sixteen on Friday.”
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