Renata severed all direct communication. She stopped replying to my desperate texts containing photos of Marigold’s milestones. For months, she had reliably attached a red heart emoji to every picture I sent; now, the digital silence was deafening. She unfriended me on Facebook. When I called her on Easter Sunday, the phone rolled directly to a generic voicemail.
Then, she deployed her flying monkeys.
My aunt—Renata’s older sister—called me at the pharmacy. “I have no idea what kind of demonic influence has possessed you,” she hissed into the receiver, bypassing any greeting. “Your mother sacrificed her youth, her sanity, and her entire life to care for you after Declan died. And now you are allowing that bitter old Italian woman to poison you against your own flesh and blood over money?”
“Aunt Carol—” I tried to interject.
“Over money, Jana!” she shrieked. “You have a newborn child! You should be on your knees thanking Renata, not dragging her through the mud! You are a disgrace to this family.”
“Did she happen to mention exactly how much money we are discussing?” I asked, my voice deadly calm.
My aunt scoffed. “She told me everything I need to know. Drop this, Jana, before you destroy the only family you have left.”
When she hung up, a wave of profound nausea washed over me. I nearly abandoned the crusade right then and there.
That evening in April, I strapped a sleeping Marigold into her car seat and drove out to Glen Allen. I parked my Corolla in the shadows across the street from the Busby fortress. I was defeated. I was starved for maternal affection.
Through the slats of the pristine white privacy fence, the underwater pool lights suddenly ignited. The water glowed a radioactive blue, seamlessly morphing into neon pink, then an eerie emerald green, before cycling back to blue. Parked in the driveway were Royal’s two monstrous, chrome-accented trucks, boasting his name in giant decals.
Four hundred thousand dollars.
I shifted the car into drive and drove back to my drafty apartment. I was done begging for scraps of love from a woman who had dined like a queen on my inheritance.
I’d been forced back to work a mere six weeks postpartum because corporate policy didn’t believe in paid maternity leave, and six weeks of zero income was the absolute limit my bank account could absorb before I faced eviction.
I was forced to pump breast milk in a squalid, windowless breakroom wedged between the chemical storage closet and the public restrooms.
Wava is a sixty-one-year-old pharmacy technician who has survived the retail trenches for three decades. She wears her bifocals on a homemade chain constructed of linked paper clips. Every two hours, without a word of complaint, Wava would commandeer my cash register, loudly informing impatient customers that I was on a “critical consultation call with a physician.”
Childcare for Marigold was bleeding me dry at $1,380 a month. My rent was $1,250.
I did that brutal arithmetic, too, scribbling on the back of yet another CVS receipt. When Nonna discovered my financial hemorrhaging, she offered to cover the daycare tuition indefinitely.
“No, Nonna,” I refused, my pride flaring.
“Jana, do not play the proud martyr with me,” she scolded.
“I’m not being proud,” I told her, my voice hard as flint. “I do not want a dime of your money. I want mine.”
In late April, Mr. Duca filed a petition in the Henrico County Circuit Court. It was a legal sledgehammer designed to compel the trustee to produce the accounting.
Because I was the legal beneficiary, my name was emblazoned at the top of the petition as the primary plaintiff. Nonna, legally speaking, was a ghost in this fight; she was forbidden from being a named party. Her only role was to finance the war, which she did with terrifying enthusiasm.
The petition demanded the court force my mother to account for every cent since 2012 and begged the judge to investigate whether the trust had been managed with a shred of fiduciary duty.
I stood in the sweltering asphalt parking lot outside Mr. Duca’s office, reading the bold black letters of Jana Kersey v. Renata Busby, while Marigold wailed for a bottle in the backseat. It felt as though I was filing a lawsuit against my own childhood.
The initial hearing took place on a rainy Tuesday in May. The courtroom was air-conditioned, so frigid that I kept Marigold cocooned in her thrift-store bunting for the duration.
Renata didn’t even bother to appear.
She sent a slick, young junior associate clutching a rolling leather briefcase. The lawyer confidently argued that the adult beneficiary had legally waived all accounting rights, and assured the court that the trustee had impeccably exhausted the funds providing for the petitioner’s welfare.
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