The summer I was sixteen, I spent eight weeks working the early morning shift at a coffee shop two miles from our house, waking at four-thirty to catch the first bus, coming home in the afternoons smelling of espresso and steamed milk. I was saving for art camp, a two-week program at a studio in Austin that cost eleven hundred dollars and that I had circled in a catalog I kept under my mattress like a contraband document. I had been asking my parents about it since February.
The answer was always some version of the same thing: money doesn’t grow on trees, Victoria. You want something, you earn it. I earned it.
I saved exactly what I needed and a little more for the bus fare and the supply list, and I went, and it was the best two weeks of my adolescence. What I did not know then, what I would not know for another nine years, was that while I was counting tips and setting alarms for four-thirty in the morning, there was an account in my name containing more money than my parents had spent on our house. My name is Victoria Bellmont, and this is the story of how I found out.
We lived in Bellmont Heights, which is one of those Dallas neighborhoods where the houses are set back far enough from the street that you cannot see the front doors from the sidewalk, where the landscaping is so precisely maintained it looks architectural rather than botanical, and where the assumption of wealth is so thoroughly built into the environment that the word itself is never spoken aloud. My father, Robert, ran a corporate law practice that specialized in mergers. My mother, Catherine, managed the social infrastructure of our family’s life with the same precision and ambition that my father applied to his work.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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