She stopped sorting the mail when I told her what the company had said. I asked her why someone had called them twice using my name when I had never spoken to them. She said she didn’t know anything about it, but her hands were shaking. I reminded her that she’d been handling my mail for months. Then she quietly admitted she’d been calling companies pretending to be me whenever she needed information about my accounts.
I asked what she had been trying to find. She wouldn’t answer at first. Then she told me she’d discovered that my late husband had left me something I had never mentioned to the family. She’d seen a letter from the bank months earlier and became convinced I was hiding money from my son. The calls weren’t about stealing from me, she insisted. She wanted to know whether there was an inheritance coming and how much it was worth.
Then I placed the two envelopes on the table and told her the company had given me the name of the caller. It wasn’t hers. It was my son’s. She looked at me for a long time before finally whispering, “He told me to do it.” I asked why he’d needed her to pretend to be me. She started crying and said they were drowning in debt, and my son was terrified I’d find out they’d already borrowed $42,000 using my name.
