My daughter said her father had asked her for money in 2023, two years after my treatment was over. She had been in graduate school and barely had enough for herself, but she’d still sent him something because he told her it was for an unexpected medical expense. I asked what expense, and she said he had told her it was connected to the treatment I’d already finished.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that conversation. The insurance company had covered my trial in full, and my husband had been sitting beside me when they told us that. So I asked my daughter exactly how much she had sent him and what account he gave her, and she pulled up the old messages. There were several payments, and the explanation he gave her was almost identical to the one he’d given our friends years earlier.
Then she showed me one message I had never seen. He had told her I still had medical bills, even though the final treatment bill had been paid years before. I went back through every fundraiser record, every loan, and every time he had asked someone for money, and the dates started forming a pattern. And when my daughter noticed the same name appearing on one of his transfers, she asked me a question that made me realize we were finally looking in the right place…
