Tyler sold real estate, or at least that was the official version. The real version was messier. He leased a different luxury car every year, wore suits he couldn’t pay for, and flooded social media with carefully staged photos of penthouse listings, rooftop drinks, and captions about “the grind.” What almost nobody knew was that he was drowning—sports betting, online poker, unpaid taxes, shaky deals, forged documents, and the kind of debt that stops being funny the moment the wrong people start asking for it back.
I knew.
I knew because for three years, I watched them all.
And for three years, I saved them.
Quietly. Repeatedly. Completely anonymously.
When my mother maxed out another round of credit cards—and she did, with the reliability of a clock—mysterious electronic payments would appear just before collection notices turned uglier. She thought her luck had turned. Maybe she believed my father had landed a bonus he wasn’t discussing. Maybe she never thought about it at all. That would have been more in character.