It came in a letter with a crest on it and I read it about eleven times on a bed.
Which brings me to the part that is mine.
PART 4
I took that money for two years.
Eighty thousand dollars, in eight payments, between the September of 2019 and the June of 2021.
It paid for a course, a flat, a laptop, and the first four months of being a person with a door of her own.
And I knew it was wrong.
Not wrong as in stolen. Not wrong as in somebody is going to come and ask for it back.
Wrong as in it did not make sense. And I knew it did not make sense inside about four days of that letter arriving.
Forty thousand a year is not a care leavers’ bursary. I knew what those were. Four of us came out of that unit in 2019 and I knew what the other three got, because we talked about it, and the largest of them was four thousand.
