I asked the manager to print every authorized user and every photograph attached to the account. The second card belonged to a nineteen-year-old girl, and the emergency contact was my brother’s name. I asked whether she had ever used the membership with my brother’s wife. He checked the entry records and said they usually came in together on Tuesday evenings. Then I noticed something stranger: the girl had been added six months after the first card, but the billing address on both cards was mine. I have lived at the same house for thirty-seven years, and nobody in my brother’s family has ever lived there.
I called my brother and asked him why his wife was using my identity. He immediately said there had to be some mistake. I told him about the second card. He went quiet when I gave him the girl’s name. Then he said she was someone his wife had been helping and that I shouldn’t get involved. I asked why my Social Security number was attached to her membership. He said his wife had used mine because she “needed a clean account.” I asked what that meant. He wouldn’t answer. So I asked the gym for the original enrollment form. The signature wasn’t mine, and the email address belonged to an account I had never seen before.
The manager called me the next morning and said there was one more document attached to the account. It was a copy of an insurance card, and the policyholder name was mine. I asked what the girl had been insured for. He said he couldn’t tell me, but the policy had been added the same month she received her gym card. Then he read me the beneficiary information because he thought I was the policyholder. The beneficiary was my brother’s wife. I drove straight to my brother’s house and found his wife in the driveway. Before I could say anything, she looked at me and said, “You weren’t supposed to find out until she turned twenty-one.” I asked who she was. She looked at me for a long moment and said, “She’s your brother’s daughter. The family has been keeping her from you since the day she was born.”
