I hung up, grabbed my coat, and texted the one person who never told me to “be the bigger person.”
Tasha: Where are you? I’m on my way.
Part 2
Tasha met me at a downtown coffee shop with the kind of energy you want in a crisis: calm, practical, and slightly furious.
I slid my phone across the booth. She scrolled through the transactions, her lips thinning into a hard line. “Okay. We’re not reacting emotionally. We’re reacting strategically.”
On my laptop, right there in the coffee shop, I called my bank. I reported the card stolen and the transactions unauthorized. I used the word “theft.” I moved my remaining funds to a new bank, changed every password, and froze my credit.
“Good,” Tasha said. “Now we prove it.”
Back at my apartment, the air felt contaminated. I imagined my mother moving through my rooms in the dead of night, knowing exactly where my wallet was. I swallowed the nausea and logged into my building’s security app.
I pulled up the camera timeline for the hallway. At 12:07 a.m., my mother appeared on screen.
She wore a dark hoodie, glancing up and down the hallway before unlocking my door with the spare key. Thirty minutes later, she left with my wallet tucked under her arm. I saved the clip to my laptop, a thumb drive, and emailed it to myself.
