The worst of it, the part that still catches in my throat, involved two people: my grandmother, who was gone, and Damon’s mother, who very much was not.
Naomi’s audit turned up a transfer — sixty-four thousand dollars, moved from my trust through the usual channels into an LLC owned by Priscilla Rothwell, Damon’s mother.
It had covered the down payment on a beachfront condo in Oregon.
This was the same woman who had spent five years letting me know, in a thousand small ways, that I was not quite good enough for her son; who had called my body a waiting room; who, when I later confronted the family, would claim she had never known anything about the money because business was “men’s work.” She had known enough to spend it.
And underneath all of it was the reason, which Naomi pieced together from the corporate filings: the family firm had been quietly sliding toward bankruptcy for two years before my divorce.
When the banks stopped lending to them, they had looked around for a source of money that would not ask hard questions — and they had found one, sitting in the trust of a grieving, distracted, soon-to-be-ex-wife who had handed her husband the keys during the worst season of her life.
My grandmother, Amalia, had built that estate over decades for one reason: so that I would never, ever be financially dependent on anyone.
And the people who held me in the deepest contempt had turned the very thing meant to protect me into the thing that funded their contempt.
That was what I could not forgive.
Not the affair.
That.
Chapter 11 — Aurora
