The note said she wasn’t allowed to call because she’d gotten angry when Riley’s phone was handed to her and refused to use it. She had told her mother it wasn’t hers and that Riley had already put stickers on the case, but her mother peeled them off and her stepfather told her to stop being dramatic. When she tried to give the phone back to Riley herself, he took it away again and grounded her. The sixty dollars were her Christmas money, and she wrote that she wanted Riley to have it because she felt like she’d stolen her present even though nobody had asked her whether she wanted it.
Riley read the note twice and immediately asked if we could send the money back. She wasn’t angry at the girl; she was worried she’d get into even more trouble if somebody discovered what she’d done. Then she told me something she’d kept quiet since Christmas. Her father had originally bought both girls phones. She knew because she’d seen two identical boxes under the tree before everyone came downstairs. But only Riley opened one that morning. The second box disappeared, and later she overheard her father arguing with his wife about returning it because they’d spent too much. Six days later, when the other girl’s old phone broke, suddenly Riley’s phone became the convenient solution.
I called her father and asked him directly whether there had originally been two phones. He denied it and said Riley was confused. So I left it alone until his stepdaughter’s grandmother called me two weeks later. She had found the girl crying over the punishment and wanted to understand what had happened. She also happened to be the person who had driven them to the electronics store before Christmas. She still had the receipt because she’d paid for part of the gifts, and there were two identical phones on it — but one had been returned on December 27, and the refund hadn’t gone back to my ex’s card. It had gone onto his wife’s card, three days before she decided Riley should surrender the only phone left.
