If you walk out of Apex Media to play live-in nurse to that washed-up recluse, you are dead to this family and blacklisted from Hollywood, my uncle Victor Cross told me five years ago.
Back at Eleanor’s bungalow, the silence felt heavy. Arthur Pendelton’s words about Victor’s father echoed in my mind. Now, another layer of betrayal began to unravel.
Among the papers Arthur had given me for review were Eleanor’s personal bank ledgers. They were meticulous, every entry carefully recorded in her elegant, looping handwriting. I sat at the small kitchen table, the ledgers spread out before me, a chipped ceramic mug of coffee growing cold beside them.
I traced the rows of dates and amounts, looking for anything unusual. Most entries were for groceries, utilities, the occasional medical bill. Then I saw it.
A recurring outgoing transfer. Every single month, on the third Tuesday. For the exact amount of $2,000.
I followed the trail of these transfers, flipping through page after page. They started exactly twenty years ago, almost to the day. And they continued, without fail, right up until Eleanor’s final month.
My finger landed on the recipient’s name, scrawled in Eleanor’s hand next to the first transfer: “Chloe Bennett.”
My mother.
The air left my lungs in a rush. Twenty years. Two thousand dollars a month. That was nearly half a million dollars, discreetly sent, never mentioned.
Chloe had told me, and Victor had publicly declared, that Eleanor was a stranger, a distant relative by some obscure branch, a “nobody” that I had foolishly dedicated five years to. They had always presented her as a woman living on her own meager pension, cut off from the family.
But my mother had known. She had known Eleanor was alive, living barely three miles away. She had accepted Eleanor’s money, month after month, year after year, all while playing along with Victor’s narrative of Eleanor being a delusional recluse.
The betrayal was a sharp, physical pain. Not just Victor’s grand fraud, but this quiet, personal deceit. My own mother, taking money from the grandmother she pretended not to know, complicit in the lie that had erased Eleanor from our lives and from history.
The coffee cup trembled slightly in my hand. Everything I thought I knew about my family was crumbling.
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