The estate needed executing, and I was moving to the other side of the world, and my sister was staying behind, and so I did the thing that families do: I gave her my signature, my legal authority, my faith, so that she could handle what needed handling while I was gone.

That signature was, in a sense, a gift of trust, the most concrete kind there is, the willingness to let another person act legally in your name.

And my sister took that gift, that document born of grief and family and faith, and she used it as the raw material for the theft of our mother’s home.

She did not merely steal from me.

She stole from me using the very trust I had extended to her.