Chapter 18
Three months passed without another word from Patricia. The winter snow arrived, burying Cedar Rapids in a thick blanket of white.
Noah turned three and a half, his vocabulary exploding. He loved talking about his 'space box' and his blue elephant. Life felt normal again, but Ethan never stopped checking the security cameras every night before bed.
One evening, while Lauren was putting Noah to sleep, Ethan was cleaning up the kitchen. His phone buzzed. It was an email from an automated credit monitoring service.
‘Alert: A new line of credit has been opened in your name.’
Ethan frowned. He hadn’t opened any new accounts. He clicked the link and logged into his credit bureau profile.
His breath caught. A mortgage application had been submitted and approved for a small townhouse on the north side of town. The co-signer on the loan? Ethan Miller.
But he had never signed anything.
He frantically dug deeper, looking at the attached documents uploaded to the portal. The signature on the digital document looked exactly like his, but the email address associated with the application wasn't his. It was an old Yahoo account he hadn’t used since college.
An account his mother had the password to.
She hadn't just given up; she had stolen his identity to buy herself a house using his immaculate credit score.
“Ethan?” Lauren’s voice called from the stairs. “Is everything okay? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Ethan stared at the screen, his mind spinning. If he reported the fraud, his mother would go to prison. If he didn’t, he was on the hook for a $250,000 mortgage for a woman who hated his wife.
Before he could answer Lauren, the house suddenly plunged into pitch-black darkness.
May you like
The power was out. But looking out the window, the neighbor’s houses still had their Christmas lights twinkling brightly.
Only their house was dark.
