I asked her to read the relationship next to the woman’s name first, and she said “daughter.” I told her I didn’t have a daughter, and then asked about the boy. She said he was listed as my grandson. I laughed because I don’t have grandchildren that age, and I have lived alone since my husband died. She turned the screen back toward herself and said the application had been submitted online using my account, with my name, my address, and a household income that matched the pension I’d been receiving since 2019. Then she read me the phone number attached to the application, and I knew it. It belonged to my daughter-in-law, the woman who hadn’t spoken to me in six years.
I called her that night. She didn’t answer, so I left one message asking why she had put herself and a fourteen-year-old boy on my gas account. She called back eleven minutes later and said, “Because that’s what your son told me to do.” I said my son had been dead since 2020. She started crying and said she knew that, but she’d been receiving money every month from an account in his name. I asked where the boy came from. She said he was my son’s child from before their marriage, and she’d been raising him quietly because my son had told her I would never accept him. I told her my son had never mentioned another child. She said, “He didn’t mention him to you because you weren’t supposed to find out until he was eighteen.”
I went back to the energy office the next morning and asked for the complete application. There was a second document attached, dated three weeks after my son’s funeral. It was a handwritten authorization allowing someone else to manage utility accounts at my address, and the signature looked exactly like my son’s. I asked the clerk whether the document had been notarized. She said yes. Then she gave me the notary’s name. It was the same woman who had signed my son’s death certificate as a witness. I sat there staring at the paper until the clerk noticed something I hadn’t: the authorization wasn’t actually giving my daughter-in-law permission to use my account.
It was transferring the account into my name because the boy had already been registered as living in my house.
