Neither of them answered. My mother wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing her mascara. My father stared at something in the distance.
“Answer your granddaughter,” Vivien commanded.
“We will need to go through everything carefully,” my father hedged. “There were a lot of complex transactions over the years. We invested in several business opportunities that seemed promising at the time. Some of them paid off, some did not. We paid for your education, Maggie. Your rent during college, your car insurance. All of those things came from somewhere.”
“I had student loans,” I said, my mind reeling. “I have $50,000 in student loan debt that I am going to be paying off for the next decade. And you just said you paid for my education from the trust fund.”
“Partially,” my mother interjected. “We paid for some of it, but college is expensive, Maggie. Even with the trust fund, we had to make choices.”
My grandmother made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a snarl.
“I paid for college. The trust fund was supposed to be for after, to give her a foundation to build on. And you dare to stand here and tell me you spent it on things you should have been paying for yourselves?”
People were definitely staring now. I could feel their eyes on us, could sense the shift in the atmosphere as graduation joy curdled into something uglier. I wanted to disappear, to rewind the day and go back to the moment before my grandmother asked her innocent question. But I also wanted answers. Needed them.
“I want to see the paperwork, too,” I said. “Everything. Every bank statement, every investment record, every check you wrote. If that money was supposed to be mine, I have a right to know what happened to it.”
My mother looked like she might be sick.
“Maggie, please. You do not understand how complicated these things are. Your father and I, we did our best. We made some mistakes, yes. But we were trying to secure a better future for all of us.”
“For all of us,” I repeated. “You mean for yourselves?”
“That is not fair,” my father protested. “Everything we did, we did with you in mind. The business opportunities we invested in, if they had paid off, you would have benefited enormously. You would have had twice what you started with. We were trying to grow your wealth.”
“By gambling with it,” my grandmother’s contempt was palpable. “By using your daughter’s inheritance as your personal investment fund. Did you even consult with financial advisers? Did you have any professional oversight at all?”
The answer, clearly written on both their faces, was no.
