The man said his daughter went to school with Cole and had mentioned the truck disappearing sometime in June. He hadn’t thought much about it until she came home upset after hearing Cole explain to another kid why he was getting rides to work. Cole hadn’t complained about losing the truck. He’d apparently said, “My dad needed the money more than I needed the truck,” and then asked whether anybody could give him a ride to the restaurant that evening. The man’s daughter knew Cole had spent two summers mowing lawns and bussing tables to buy it, and when she told her father, he went outside and looked at the title he’d been given.
The title was still in my ex’s name because Cole had been fifteen when they bought the truck, but the man also had the original Marketplace messages. In them, my ex had written that he was selling “my son’s old truck because he upgraded,” which wasn’t remotely true. Then the buyer showed me something else. Before paying, he’d asked why the truck was being sold for only three thousand dollars when similar ones were listed for considerably more. My ex replied that he needed cash quickly for “family expenses.” The buyer said he’d assumed that meant an emergency. What he hadn’t known was that the sixteen-year-old who actually paid for the truck hadn’t even been told it was for sale.
He handed me the signed title and said he’d take the loss because he wasn’t keeping a kid’s truck under those circumstances. I called Cole at work, and when he came home and saw it in the driveway, he just stood there with his apron still tied around his waist. Then the man’s daughter told him why she’d finally told her father everything. She’d overheard Cole’s stepbrother bragging at school that his new dirt bike had cost exactly three thousand dollars — and that his stepfather had bought it for him in April, three days after Cole’s truck was sold.
