She became, over about two years, the mother I had not had.
But the worst of it came later.
I was eighteen and about to start college and I badly needed a working prosthetic. I could not afford one, so I applied for a small student loan.
The man looked at his screen for a long time. Then he said:
Are you aware you’ve got over forty thousand dollars of delinquent debt?
I laughed. I genuinely thought he had the wrong person on the screen.
He did not.
Credit cards in my name. Personal loans. Store accounts at two department stores.
Some of them opened while I was still a child.
And when we started tracing what had been bought, it was not complicated.
Clothes. Holidays. A marquee. A summer programme in Europe for a sixteen-year-old.
While I was on those crutches, they were destroying my credit so that their other daughter could live well.
