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"How did you manage it?" I asked. "Visiting both of them. Splitting your entire life."
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"Business trips to the regional office," Foster said. "Two, sometimes three times a month. I told you it was work. I told Renata it was helping an aunt. I've spent eight years being exactly the kind of person I never once wanted to become."
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I called a lawyer the following morning, a sharp, direct woman named Priscilla Vance who specialized in exactly this kind of complicated family fraud.
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"This is significant," she told me, once I'd laid out the full picture. "Falsified death certificates carry serious criminal penalties. Renata's nursing license is almost certainly forfeit once the medical board reviews this. Foster's exposure here goes considerably beyond a simple divorce filing."
⸻
The police investigation moved forward alongside my own divorce proceedings, Renata's falsified paperwork eventually surfacing clearly enough in hospital records that both she and Foster faced formal charges — fraud, falsification of official documents, and, given the deliberate nature of the deception, additional charges neither of them had anticipated when Renata first agreed to Foster's plan eight years earlier.
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I want to be honest that discovering Silas didn't feel like the joyful reunion this kind of story sometimes gets told as. He was eight years old, raised entirely by Renata, understandably confused and frightened by an entire family suddenly rearranging itself around him without his consent.
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We worked slowly, over the following months, with a family therapist who specialized in exactly this kind of complex reunification, letting Milo and Silas build an actual relationship instead of forcing an instant bond neither boy was prepared for.
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"Do I have to call you Mom?" Silas asked me once, several weeks into supervised visits that were slowly becoming less formally supervised as the courts grew more comfortable with the arrangement.
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