The woman from my old office stopped me in the grocery store and asked why my husband had written that I’d been unable to work for six months. I told her I hadn’t, because I had actually worked until the week before my treatment started. She looked surprised and said that was strange, because she remembered reading the fundraiser and thinking how generous everyone had been.
That night I opened the old GoFundMe again and read the description more carefully than I had in years. The six-month detail was repeated in three different places, along with a sentence about a bill I had never seen. I started checking the dates against my medical records and realized the story had been written before some of the things it described had even happened.
Then I found an archived message from the fundraiser that I had never seen before. Someone had asked my husband whether the money would be refunded if my insurance covered the treatment, and his answer made my stomach drop. He didn’t say the money would be returned — he said there was “another reason” they needed it.
