Chapter 4 - THE CAREGIVER WHO WAS NEVER THERE
Becca did not accuse anyone immediately.
She contacted my school counselor, who arranged a meeting with a youth legal-aid attorney and a child-welfare liaison. Because I was still a minor and had been forced from my home, the adults around me had obligations my parents could not erase by calling me rebellious.
I hated the interviews at first.
Every question sounded like another chance for someone to decide I was exaggerating.
Who prepared dinner?
Who helped Noah with hygiene?
Who attended medical appointments?
How often were your parents away?
Did anyone pay you?
Did Aunt Teresa provide care?
I answered carefully.
Then the liaison requested records through the appropriate state channels.
The first documents arrived two weeks later.
Noah qualified for a Medicaid home-and-community-based support program. The program authorized up to twenty-six hours of respite and in-home assistance each week.
For almost five years, electronic time sheets claimed Aunt Teresa provided most of those hours.
The state deposited payments into an account jointly controlled by Teresa and my mother.
Aunt Teresa had moved to South Carolina three years earlier.
The time sheets continued.
Some claimed she cared for Noah while card transactions placed her hundreds of miles away.
Others listed overnight shifts when my parents had left me alone with all four children.
The fraud was not buried inside a complicated corporation.
It was hidden inside ordinary family life.
Every time I missed school to care for Noah, someone else claimed payment.
Every time I sat awake during a medical crisis, a false caregiver reported the hours.
Every sacrifice my parents called family duty had already been billed to the state under another adult’s name.
The total exceeded seventy-eight thousand dollars.
My parents had not needed a free babysitter because they lacked childcare money.
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They were already receiving childcare money.
They wanted me because using me allowed them to keep it.
