The last thing my sister said to me before I left home was, “Good luck on your own.”
She said it while holding a glass of iced tea and smiling.
Thirteen hours later, a bank manager locked his office door with me inside and told me, very quietly, that the police were there for me. A few weeks after that, I sat in a plain gray room while a forensic examiner laid two signatures side by side on a table—mine and a copy of mine—and told me that whoever had written the second one knew my name very well but had never once watched me write it.
I’ll tell you how a girl with two cardboard boxes and one packed suitcase ended up in that bank. But first, you need to understand something about me.
My name is Brier Pemrook. I’m eighteen years old, and I am not dramatic. I keep books. I spend my afternoons making sure that the number on one page matches the number on another. And when it doesn’t, I do not shout. I go looking for the missing piece.
That is the only way I know how to tell this story. One line at a time, in order, with the receipts.
I grew up in Pickerington, Ohio, a suburb about twenty minutes outside Columbus, in a two-story brick house with a wide front porch and a two-car garage. There was a family photograph hanging in the front hall, taken the year I turned nine. All four of us stood on that porch in matching white shirts.
People who came to the house always stopped to admire it. We looked like a family that had never raised its voice. That photograph was the best piece of work any of us ever did.
My father, Walton Pemrook, owned a small company called Pemrook Commercial Partners. He bought and leased office buildings and strip malls, and he dressed every day as though a client might be watching through the window.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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