Chapter 5 - MiaMy daughter came home from college that Friday for what was supposed to be an ordinary weekend visit, and I hadn't yet found the words to tell her that her father had forged her grandfather's boat into a small criminal enterprise.
Mia was nineteen, sharp-eyed in the particular way of a girl who had grown up watching adults think she wasn't paying attention. She dropped her duffel bag in the front hall and took one look at my face before I'd said a single word.
"Mom. What happened?"
I hadn't planned to tell her that first night. I'd planned, foolishly, to give her one more ordinary weekend before her world tilted the way mine had. But Mia had always been better at reading silence than I gave her credit for, and by the time I'd made two cups of tea neither of us drank, the whole story had come out of me in pieces — the marina, the signature, the invoices, the account.
She was quiet for a long time after I finished. Then she said, very carefully, "Is this why Dad's been weird about me following him on social media?"
My stomach turned. "What do you mean?"
"He asked me not to follow some business account a few months ago. Said it was 'confusing to keep separate accounts organized' or something. I didn't think anything of it." She pulled out her phone, scrolled, and turned the screen toward me. "Is this the account?"
It was. WanderlustCharters. Seven hundred followers, including, apparently, my own daughter, quietly unfollowed at her father's request months before any of this had surfaced to me.
"He knew you might recognize the boat," I said slowly. "He knew you'd ask questions."
Mia's jaw tightened in a way that reminded me, painfully, of her grandfather. "He used Grandpa's boat to impress his girlfriend's friends."
"It's more complicated than that," I said, though even as the words left my mouth, I wasn't sure why I was still defending any part of the situation to soften the blow for her.
"Is it, though?" Her voice cracked slightly, the first real crack in the careful composure she'd walked in with. "Mom, I loved that boat. I learned to swim off the back of that boat. Grandpa taught me to tie a bowline knot on that boat when I was seven, and Dad let some woman named Brooke pour champagne on it for her Instagram."
I didn't have an answer that would make it hurt less, so I didn't try to give her one. I just reached across the table and held her hand while she cried the way I hadn't yet fully allowed myself to.
"What are you going to do?" she asked finally.
"I'm going to get it back," I said. "All of it. The boat. My name. Whatever's left of your grandfather's estate that hasn't already been spent on someone else's champagne."
"And Dad?"
I thought about the man who had once driven four hours through a snowstorm to bring me soup when I had the flu in graduate school, and the man who had forged my signature to fund an affair on my father's boat, and understood, with a strange and quiet grief, that I no longer knew which one of those men I was actually married to — or whether the first one had ever really existed, or had simply been a performance I'd been generous enough, or naive enough, to believe.
"I don't know yet," I told her honestly. "But I know I'm not protecting him anymore. Not from this."
May you like
Mia nodded slowly, wiping her face with the back of her hand, looking older in that moment than I think either of us wanted her to be forced to look.
"Good," she said. "Because I'm not either."
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