My name is Anna, and I thought I’d done everything right. For eighteen years, every extra shift, every canceled vacation, every worn-out pair of sneakers went into one place: the college fund for my daughter, Mia. One hundred ninety-nine thousand dollars.
That number was my private trophy, the proof that I had beaten the odds as a single mom.
Then one morning, I opened my banking app and felt the floor vanish beneath me. My joint savings account, the one I’d naively kept with my mother for security ever since I was nineteen, showed a balance of exactly zero. One single transaction.
One hundred ninety-nine thousand dollars withdrawn under “authorized user.” The name was hers. My mom.
I drove to her house with my hands shaking on the steering wheel, replaying every sacrifice I’d made for that money. When I confronted her, my voice was low and deadly calm.
“Where is Mia’s college fund?”
She didn’t flinch.
She actually laughed.
“Thanks for funding your sister’s wedding,” she said like it was some kind of joke, like she hadn’t just burned my daughter’s future to the ground. Then she added, almost casually, “And no, Anna, you’re not invited. It’s a small family event.
You understand?”
I smiled, but it felt like my face might crack.
“Sure,” I whispered. “I understand perfectly.”
Moments later, as I walked back to my car, my phone buzzed. My dad’s name lit up on the screen.
When I answered, all I heard was his voice breaking on the other end. He was crying. And that’s when I realized this wasn’t just about money.
It was about everything my family had been hiding for years.
“Anna, I didn’t know she actually did it,” he choked out. “She told me she was reallocating some family funds, but I never thought she meant your savings, honey.”
I pressed the phone tighter to my ear, my jaw clenched so hard it hurt.
“Dad, it was my daughter’s college fund. Every dollar I put in that account was for Mia.
You knew that.”
There was a pause, just the sound of his uneven breathing.
“Your mother said the account was still joint,” he murmured. “She said you weren’t using it, that we’d help Rebecca get her dream wedding and then figure things out later. I thought she meant she’d pay it back somehow.”
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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