Chapter 5
Camille and I had a difficult conversation a few weeks later, one I didn't especially want to have but felt was owed to both of us. She hadn't known, she told me, exactly where the two hundred and fifty thousand dollars was going to come from — only that our mother had promised to handle it, the way she always had, and Camille had learned, over a lifetime of exactly this dynamic, not to ask too many questions about how.
I believed her, mostly. I also told her, as clearly as I could, that whatever debt she was in wasn't going to be solved by my daughter's trust fund, this time or any time in the future, and that if she needed help figuring out an actual path forward — one that didn't involve our mother quietly bailing her out of consequences she needed to face directly — I was willing to help her find it. She's since started working with a financial counselor, slowly, and I'd like to believe that's a step toward something more sustainable than the pattern our mother spent years enabling.
May you like
My mother and I see each other less now, and when we do, it's supervised by distance I've built deliberately — visits at our house, on our terms, no unaccompanied access to Aubrielle's belongings, her finances, or her future. It's not the relationship I would have chosen for my mother and my daughter if none of this had happened, but it's the one that keeps Aubrielle's actual interests protected, which matters more to me now than preserving an image of family harmony that was never as solid as it looked from the outside.
Aubrielle still doesn't fully understand what happened that day, beyond the fact that her birthday party ended early and Grandma doesn't come around as much anymore. She'll understand more of it when she's older, and when she does, I want her to know the whole truth — that her father found the envelope, read what was inside it, and didn't hesitate for a single second once he understood what it meant.
