My Mother Canceled My and the Twins’ Tickets, but When I Went Silent in Response, the Smile Disappeared from Her Face

That evening my mother wrote to me that the twins and I were no longer going to Honolulu, and a few minutes later she entered her own name and the names of her siblings on our tickets.

I held the phone in my hand and could not figure out how I should tell five-year-old Maxim and Marta that the dream they had been collecting for weeks of seeing the sea had been taken away by one message. They ran around the living room wearing plastic glasses and asked each other which of them would see a turtle first.

“Mom, will real turtles swim near us?” Marta asked me.

She held a small orange inflatable ring in her hand. It was so cheap that it was already letting air out in one place.

I knelt in front of her.

“We will still see the sea, my dear.”

That was the first decision.

I made the second that night, when the children had fallen asleep and my mother no longer answered my call.

“Mom, what happened?” I wrote to her.

The reply came immediately.

“You and the twins are not flying. Irina has already agreed to go. Andrei also needs a rest. Do not call me again, I am turning off the phone.”

Then she sent me a second message: “I deleted everything by accident, but now it is already too late.”

By accident?

I contacted the airline. The operator first checked the records for a long time, then quietly told me:

“Ma’am, your and the children’s names have been removed from the passenger list. The seats have already been transferred to other people.”

“Who requested this?”

“The owner of the reservation. The change was made from your mother’s account.”

I had paid fifteen thousand dollars. For three years I had worked almost seventy hours a week, and in the evenings I took accounting consultations. I wore old shoes until the soles became thin. This trip was the only big thing I had spent on myself.

But my mother thought that if she upset me, I would call her again and apologize.

I did not call.

That same night I opened my bank account. There was still one large expense in the automatic payments — the house where my mother, Andrei, and Irina lived.

The house was registered in my name.

Years earlier, when the family needed housing, I bought it and gave it to them. My mother called it “helping the family.” But help ends when they turn it into an obligation.

In the morning I turned off the payments. Then I called a real-estate agent.

“Have you finally decided?” he asked me.

My keys lay on the windowsill. A small copper turtle hung from the ring, which Maxim had given me for my birthday.

“Yes,” I told him. “The house is for sale.”

My mother did not answer me that day. Irina sent me only a photo of a suitcase.

“Do not make a drama.”

Those words told me everything more clearly than any confession could have. They considered my money not help, but their own property.

A few days later they went to the airport. And I bought tickets to Maui with the children.

“Is this a secret surprise?” Maxim asked me.

“The biggest one,” I answered.

The next morning I sat in the sales office. The wall clock showed eleven. The agent placed the final document in front of me.

“Natalia, after the signature there will be no turning back.”

My fingers touched the copper turtle. I picked up the pen, wrote my surname, and removed the key from the ring. The agent reached his hand toward it, and at that very moment I saw that someone was quickly coming behind the door, holding a sealed folder…

The key fell into the agent’s hand, and at that same moment the house became the property of its new owner.

My mother, Andrei, and Irina knew nothing about it. They were flying on vacation with the tickets they had received with my money.

I flew to Maui with the children.

On the first evening, when Marta saw the sea, she grabbed my hand and screamed, and Maxim began to laugh. Two days later we found real turtles too. For the first time in years, I no longer checked my phone every minute.

My mother called me as soon as she returned.

“What did you do to our house?”

“I sold my house.”

“Cancel everything immediately!”

“There is nothing left to cancel. From now on I will no longer pay for your lives.”

I ended the call and blocked her number.

Twenty minutes later a neighbor wrote to me that my mother, Andrei, and Irina were standing at the entrance to my building and asking me to come down alone.

They thought I would be afraid again.

But at the same time a new email arrived in my inbox — from the real-estate agency. At the end of the letter it said that before their belongings were removed from the house, it was necessary to open one sealed folder, whose existence I had never known about…

I opened the folder the next morning, in my apartment, while Maxim and Marta, having returned from Maui, were drawing sea turtles with pencils in the kitchen.

Inside were the old house contracts, bank statements, and one audio recording. The agent told me that the previous owner had left the folder and that it could be opened only after the sale.

I turned on the recording.

I recognized my mother’s voice immediately.

“Natalia will pay for everything. Just do not tell her that Andrei and Irina are moving in with us permanently.”

Then Irina’s laughter was heard.

“If she wants to go on vacation, we will change the tickets. In the end she will still beg us.”

Andrei answered:

“The house will be ours anyway. Natalia feels too guilty to refuse.”

I stopped the recording. Such silence fell in the room that the sound of the refrigerator motor seemed terribly loud to me.

Maxim put down his pencil.

“Mom, are you feeling bad?”

“No, my boy. I just learned something.”

That same day I requested a meeting. My mother, Andrei, and Irina came to the agency’s small room. My mother held an expensive bag, and Irina still had the same suitcase whose photo she had sent me.

“All of this is fake,” my mother said.

I turned on the recording.

Her own voice sounded in the room. The words bounced off the walls and struck her face directly.

Andrei grabbed the chair.

“You cannot use this.”

“I have already used it. Together with the sale documents, it was handed over to the lawyer.”

Irina lowered her eyes.

“We were just joking.”

“Is it also a joke that you canceled the tickets of three people?”

For the first time my mother could not answer me.

Then the lawyer placed a second document on the table.

“Ms. Natalia, besides the recording, there is a complete history of bank transfers. Your family members took out loans in your name for several years.”

My heart froze.

“What loans?”

He turned the paper toward me. My signature could be seen there, but I had never signed these documents.

My mother immediately exclaimed:

“This was done with your consent!”

“No,” the lawyer said calmly. “The signatures have been sent for examination. And the bank just called us: the applications were submitted from the same device.”

Andrei’s face went pale.

That evening I received a call from the police. The examination result was ready, and the matter of the other people’s signatures turned out to be only the beginning.

“Ms. Natalia,” the investigator told me, “another victim has appeared in your case. And your mother mentioned her name in the last message…”

And my mother still did not know that the most serious thing was not the loss of the house…