Rick, the man who hadn’t cried at his own mother’s funeral, had tears on his face.
He said, “We gave her everything. Everything, Carl. We pulled from our retirement. Your mother was going to delay Social Security so we could help her. We gave her everything, and she was just handing it to some stranger on the internet.”
I said, “I know, and I’m sorry.”
Not because it was my fault, but because I knew this was going to hurt them, and I didn’t enjoy watching it happen.
Whatever issues I had with my parents, they didn’t deserve to be financially exploited by their own daughter.
My mom looked at me and said, “Why didn’t you tell us sooner?”
I said, “Because 2 months ago, you were in my kitchen calling me selfish for not giving Paige my bed. Two months ago, you told my wife that her comfort didn’t matter. Two months ago, Dad told me I was a bad son because I set one boundary.”
“If I had come to you then with this information, would you have believed me?”
She didn’t answer.
She didn’t have to.
We all knew the answer was no.
Then my mom asked the question I’d been waiting for.
She said, “Why? Why would she do this to us?”
I said, “I don’t know, Mom. I think that’s a question you need to ask Paige. But I’ll tell you what Todd told me.”
He said, “Paige turns people against each other so nobody’s watching what she’s doing.”
She did it to him.
She did it to me, and she’s been doing it to you.
The silence on that deck was something else.
My mom was crying real tears now, not the performance tears from the bed argument.
These were the tears of a woman realizing she’d been played by her own child.
My dad put his head in his hands.
After a long moment, my dad looked up at me and said, “I called you selfish in your own house in front of your wife.”
I said, “Yeah, you did.”
He said, “I was wrong.”
That’s all he said.
I was wrong.
But the way he said it, I could tell it cost him everything.
Rick is not a man who admits fault.
He’s not built that way, but he said it.
And I felt something loosen in my chest that had been tight for months.
My mom stood up and came over to where I was sitting.
She put her hands on my face, looked me in the eyes, and said, “I’m so sorry, Carl, for all of it. For the bed, for the things I said to Jenna. For the way I’ve been with Paige. I didn’t see it. I should have seen it, and I didn’t.”
I said, “It’s okay, Mom.”
She said, “No, it’s not okay, but I’m going to make it right.”
They called Paige that afternoon from our living room.
My dad put her on speakerphone.
He didn’t yell.
He didn’t raise his voice.
He simply said, “Paige, we know about the money. We know about the man online. We’ve seen the bank statements.”
The silence on the other end of that phone was a different kind of silence than the one after I told them to get out.
This was the silence of someone who just realized the walls are closing in and there’s no exit.
Paige tried everything.
She denied it at first.
Then she said it was a misunderstanding.
Then she said she was being manipulated by the guy and she was a victim, too.
Then she cried.
Then she got angry.
She said, “Carl put you up to this, didn’t he? He’s been trying to turn you against me.”
My dad said, “Paige, stop. Nobody turned us against you. You did this to yourself.”
My mom said, “We want every dollar accounted for, and we want you to get help. Real help. Not the kind where you tell us you’re going to therapy and then don’t go.”
Paige hung up.
She actually hung up on them.
My dad looked at the phone, then looked at me and said, “Well, that went about how I expected.”
Over the next few weeks, my parents went through their finances, and the damage was worse than I’d estimated.
Paige had been skimming for over a year and a half.
They had to adjust their retirement plans significantly.