Chapter 4
What Camille was "going through," as it turned out, was the collapse of a boutique investment venture she'd sunk most of her own money into eighteen months earlier — a wellness retreat business that had failed to attract the clientele or funding she'd projected, leaving her with debts to two private lenders who'd apparently stopped being patient about repayment terms in the past several weeks.
My mother had been covering smaller emergency payments out of her own savings for months, quietly, the way she'd always managed Camille's setbacks without involving me. But two hundred and fifty thousand dollars exceeded what she had available, and rather than tell Camille no, or tell me the truth and ask for help through legitimate means, she'd turned to the one significant asset she had legal signing authority over as trustee — the account she'd set up for Aubrielle years earlier, back when, I have to assume, her intentions toward my daughter had been genuinely different than they'd apparently become.
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I confirmed with the trust's financial institution the next morning that the request hadn't yet been processed, caught in an internal review queue by pure administrative luck rather than any safeguard my mother had anticipated. I had my attorney freeze any further withdrawal authority on the account within the hour, and began the formal process of having myself named as co-trustee alongside my mother, a status the original trust documents had apparently allowed for but that neither of us had exercised until that morning.
My mother didn't fight the co-trustee filing. I think some part of her understood that fighting it publicly would only invite more scrutiny into exactly how close she'd come to succeeding, and how long she might have kept quietly siphoning from an account meant for a six-year-old if that gift box hadn't fallen open in front of me.
