The Allotment Account
Chapter 03 - The Allotment Account
The account loaded slower than Emily's patience could handle, and when the full transaction history finally populated the screen, she sat very still, reading it twice to make sure she wasn't misunderstanding the numbers.
Her monthly allotment, the portion of her military pay automatically deposited for her father to manage, had been consistently higher than she remembered authorizing, a deployment special pay increase she'd forgotten to account for when she signed the original paperwork two years earlier.
The bills, rent and car payment, accounted for less than half of what came in each month.
The remaining balance, month after month, showed transfers out to an external account labeled only with a routing number Emily didn't recognize.
She called the bank's fraud department first, hands shaking slightly now, and waited twenty minutes on hold before a representative confirmed what she already suspected.
"That external account is linked to a joint checking account under the names Robert and Diane," the representative said. "Authorized transfers, ma'am, under the power of attorney on file. I can see the authorization dates back to shortly after your deployment began."
"How much," Emily said. "Total. Over the two years."
The representative was quiet for a moment, pulling the figures.
"A little over thirty one thousand dollars," she said, "transferred out beyond what would have covered your listed bills."
Emily sat with the number, feeling it land somewhere deeper than anger, somewhere closer to the specific grief of understanding a betrayal had been running quietly for years while she believed, wrongly, that her own money was simply covering her own life.
Nia found her twenty minutes later, still sitting with the phone in her lap, staring at a number that explained everything and nothing at the same time.
"Thirty one thousand dollars," Emily said, before Nia could ask. "Over two years. Transferred straight to my parents' personal account. While I was overseas."
"That's not bill management," Nia said. "That's theft."
"It's worse than theft," Emily said slowly. "It's theft from a deployed servicemember's protected pay. That's a federal statute, Nia. There are specific protections for exactly this, because deployed soldiers can't watch their own accounts."
"Do you know what the yacht cost," Nia asked.
Emily pulled up the number she'd seen in Madison's old social media post, cross-referencing it in her head against the thirty one thousand dollars still glowing on her screen.
May you like
The numbers were close enough that the coincidence stopped feeling like coincidence at all.
"They used my deployment pay to buy Madison's engagement yacht," Emily said, voice gone very quiet. "And when I called from a hospital bed asking for five thousand dollars of my own money, they told me they'd think about it."
