The note said her stepsister wasn’t supposed to be using the car temporarily. Her mother had been planning to keep it. She’d overheard her mother telling my ex that they could let my daughter continue paying the insurance while her stepsister used the car for school, because “she’s barely here anyway.” When the girl reminded her mother that the title was in my daughter’s name, her mother said that didn’t matter because my ex was her father and could decide what happened to it until she turned eighteen. The girl said she’d driven it twice after that conversation and felt sick both times, which was why she’d taken the spare key and walked two and a half miles to return it.
My daughter read the note sitting on our front steps. She didn’t get angry about her stepsister using the car; she kept asking whether the girl was going to get punished for bringing it back. Then she told me something she hadn’t mentioned in September. Her father had asked her for the title shortly after taking the keys, saying he needed it to “straighten out the insurance.” She’d refused because it was locked in my desk. That night I checked the state vehicle records, and the title was still hers, but there had been a request submitted twelve days earlier for a replacement title claiming the original had been lost.
I called my ex and asked whether he’d requested it. He denied knowing anything about a replacement until I told him I had the application number. Then he said his wife had probably handled it because she took care of paperwork in their house. The application had been mailed to their address, so I contacted the office and asked for a copy before anything could be processed. My daughter’s signature was already on it. Except it wasn’t her signature — and underneath it was a second form authorizing the vehicle to be transferred to her stepsister’s mother for one dollar.
The sixteen-year-old came back two days later with screenshots from her mother’s phone. There was a conversation between her mother and my ex from August, weeks before he ever took my daughter’s keys. They had discussed the insurance increase, the replacement title, and exactly when they could transfer the car. His wife had written, “What are we going to tell her when she asks for it back?” and my daughter’s father replied, “By the time she figures out what we’re doing, it’ll already be in your name.”
