Grandma asked how the bakery was doing that she invested fifty thousand dollars in.

Phoenix Rising

Three months crawled by with me picking up every extra shift the hospital would give me, working doubles on weekends and covering for anyone who called in sick. My credit score had dropped 200 points from all the fraudulent accounts Sullivan opened. But each disputed charge I got removed felt like winning a small battle.

The credit card companies made me fill out endless forms, submit police reports, sign affidavit, and wait on hold for hours just to prove I hadn’t bought a jet ski in Miami or opened a line of credit at Home Depot. I kept a notebook tracking every call, every case number, every representative’s name because they’d always lose my paperwork and make me start over.

The Phoenix woman texted me one Tuesday afternoon asking if we could all do a video call that weekend. And for the first time since this mess started, I actually wanted to talk to them. Saturday night, I opened my laptop to see five faces staring back at me. Each woman holding a glass of wine, except the Las Vegas woman who was nursing her new baby.

We spent the first 10 minutes just staring at each other until the Denver woman started laughing about how Sullivan always claimed he was allergic to shellfish. But she’d seen photos of him eating shrimp with me at our anniversary dinner. The Portland woman jumped in saying he told her he was deathly allergic to cats, but she’d found our Christmas card with our two cats wearing Santa hats.

We compared lies for an hour, each one more ridiculous than the last, until we were all crying from laughing so hard about his claim to three different women that he’d been a college football star when I had his yearbook showing he was in the chess club. The Denver woman said we should write a book called The Six Wives of Sullivan, and we all agreed it would probably be a bestseller.

Grandma’s doctor called the next week, saying her blood pressure was finally back to normal range, and she’d gained back five of the pounds she’d lost from stress. She’d started going to a support group at the community center for seniors who’d been scammed by family members.

And she’d even made friends with a lady named Dorothy, whose grandson had stolen her identity to buy a boat. Every Thursday, they’d have coffee after the meeting and compare notes on their legal proceedings, turning their trauma into some kind of weird social club.

My supervisor pulled me aside after a staff meeting to offer me the lead position in our department, saying she’d watched how I’d handled my personal crisis while never missing work or letting my performance slip. The raise was only $3,000 more a year, but it meant steady day shifts and no more working every holiday just to make ends meet.

I celebrated by buying myself a used couch from Craigslist to replace the milk crates in my apartment. And Parker helped me haul it up three flights of stairs while joking that at least it wasn’t stolen with someone’s Grandma’s money.

6 months after that horrible Christmas dinner, all five mothers finally had official child support orders filed in their states. And Sullivan was facing fraud charges in three different jurisdictions. The Phoenix woman sent photos of her twins eating cupcakes at her bakery’s grand reopening, funded by a legitimate investor she’d found through her business networking group.

The Denver woman had gotten her real estate license and was doing well. The Salt Lake woman had been promoted to regional manager at her hotel chain, and the Portland woman had started her own daycare center. Even the Las Vegas woman had gone back to the school for her nursing degree while her mom watched the baby.

Grandma and I started having Sunday dinners again at her house. Nothing fancy, just pasta and salad. But we’d sit at her table and talk about everything except Sullivan. She’d tell me stories about my grandpa and how they’d survived tough times before, and she’d squeeze my hand and tell me I was stronger than she ever was at my age.

The mothers and I kept our group chat active, renamed Phoenix Rising, after a vote where we all agreed it sounded better than “Sullivan Survivors”. We’d share job wins, funny dating stories, pictures of the kids at their milestones, and screenshots of Sullivan’s pathetic attempts to contact us through fake social media accounts.

Parker started coming over for dinner twice a week, bringing takeout and helping me sort through legal paperwork while making jokes about how he’d witnessed my life completely implode that night and still thought I was worth knowing.

We took things slow, just dinners and movies. But it felt good to have someone around who’d seen me at rock bottom and didn’t run away. He’d teased that most people try to hide their baggage when dating, but I dumped mine all over his front yard that night with five angry mothers and police cars, so there was nowhere to go but up from there.