Her health insurance covered part of it. Not the rest.
She applied to that foundation in the March.
She was approved in the April. There is a letter in the file on foundation paper with the logo on it, congratulating her and setting out the amount.
The money never came.
She followed up three times. In the June, in the September, and in the January of 2024.
And in the February she got a refusal, citing a review of eligibility criteria.
By then the window had closed.
She has had two further operations. She uses a wheelchair. The current position is that she may get some walking back with a frame over the next few years and she may not.
And in the part of that application form that asks why you are applying to this particular fund, Tamsin wrote three sentences.
I have read them more times than is sensible.
She wrote that she had read about the woman the foundation is named after. She wrote that she had read it twice.
And she wrote: someone with her story will understand what this is for.
She applied because of my name.
She sat at a kitchen table fifteen months after her accident and typed a sentence about trusting a stranger who had been through it — and the stranger was me, and I had never heard of her, and the woman reading the form was my sister.
There is one more document in that section and Arvo put it in deliberately. He told me so.
It is an internal note. Four lines, from Celestine to the foundation’s administrator, dated eleven days after Tamsin was approved.
It says to hold the Reyes payment for the next quarter.
And then it says: she’s young, she’ll have other options.
That is the only sentence in nine million dollars of paperwork where my sister explains herself, and it took her eleven words.
I knew that voice immediately.
It is my mother’s, at a hospital bed, in 1999, working out what to do with a problem.
PART 5
Now my part, and there is no honest version of this without it.
I knew about that foundation.
Not the theft. Not Tamsin. Nothing in that file.
But the name. I knew about the name.
In 2018 I was on a panel at a property conference, and a journalist chairing it asked me, pleasantly, at the end: and of course there’s the foundation that bears your name — how involved are you these days?
I said I had no relationship with that organisation.
And she said something warm about how modest that was, and moved on to the next question, and the room laughed, and that was that.
Afterwards I rang my lawyer and asked what it would take to get my name off a charity I had nothing to do with.
She was very good and very clear.
She said: we’d have to sue, and they’d defend it, and it becomes a public record. The hospital. Your parents. The bin bag. All of it, in a filing, and then in the press, with your face on it.
She said: it’s your call. But you should know what it costs.
I thought about it for about a week.
And then I let them keep it.
I was thirty-eight months into a company that was finally working. I had spent eleven years being a credit report and a police file and a case number, and I had just got to the point where nobody in a meeting knew anything about me except what I told them.
I was not going to let anybody put my leg in a newspaper again.