Gone.
I pulled up the transaction history.
Transfers, one after another. Five thousand dollars. Eight thousand. Three thousand. Ten thousand. All going to the same account. An account I didn’t recognize.
My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears.
I clicked on the account information page. There was a section I never looked at. Authorized Users and Agents.
There was a name there.
Evelyn M. Hollis. Agent under Power of Attorney.
There was a document attached. Uploaded seven months ago. A little PDF icon.
I opened it.
It was a power of attorney. A durable, general power of attorney, giving my mother complete authority over my finances while I was deployed.
At the bottom, there was a signature.
Katherine A. Hollis.
It was my name. It looked almost like my handwriting. The K was right. The loop on the H was almost right.
Except I had never signed it.
I had never seen this document in my life.
I sat there on the cot for a long time, staring at my own name.
I thought about the day before I deployed. My mother standing in my kitchen. “Why don’t you let your father and me keep an eye on the place?”
I thought about how easy I’d made it for them.
I went through the records one more time. Slowly. I wrote every number down on the back of an envelope, the way my grandfather taught me to do the checkbook when I was ten.
Then I added it all up.
The total came to $45,000.
Upstairs, somebody turned on music. I heard my mother laugh.
Even then, I didn’t go up and confront anyone.
Not yet.
Vance came home at six-fifteen.
I heard his truck in the driveway. I heard the front door. I heard Chloe come down the stairs slowly, and my mother say, “Careful, sweetie, careful,” and then the murmur of all their voices in the kitchen.
