Chapter 3 - Plan B
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We ended up in a modest boarding house near the city center. It was nothing glamorous—a single furnished room, a squeaky double bed, a shared bathroom down the hall, and an elderly landlady named Mrs. Gable who kindly agreed to accept weekly cash payments.
Once I managed to get Sophia settled with a warm cup of milk and a cartoon on my laptop, she finally drifted off to sleep.
I sat on the edge of the mattress, the silence of the tiny room ringing in my ears. I pulled out my phone.
I opened a private, secure note I had kept saved on my cloud drive for years. It was titled simply: PLAN B.
I tapped the screen and typed a single line beneath it:
Sunday: Activated.
Next, I opened my banking app. I navigated straight to the recurring monthly transfer menu. There it was, set to leave my account on the 15th of every single month, bound for Karla’s mortgage lender: $850.00.
For years, Karla had boasted to her friends, her coworkers, and her wealthy boyfriend that she was an independent woman paying off her mortgage entirely on her own.
I hovered my thumb over the screen. I hit Cancel Recurring Transfer.
The app asked if I was sure. I confirmed it twice, watching the scheduled payment vanish into the digital void.
Then, I opened a hidden cloud storage folder. It contained digital scans of a public deed, massive bank receipts, pharmaceutical payment records, and property tax documents that my family had conveniently forgotten existed.
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Five years ago, by my parents' own deliberate and frantic choice, the very apartment they had just thrown me out of had been legally gifted and transferred entirely into my name.
They assumed I had forgotten all about it. As I turned off my phone screen and watched my daughter sleep peacefully, I realized that throwing away that bowl of soup was about to become the most expensive mistake my family ever made.
