PART 2 – My Stepson Claimed Someone Had Warned Him About My Gambling, but He Could Not Tell Me Who That Person Was

I kept coming back to Jordan's answer.

He couldn't remember.

That was all he had given me.

I thought about what that meant.

He had passed along a claim about my finances.

He had told his mother I was keeping a serious problem from her.

And now, when I asked where the information came from, he couldn't name anyone.

I didn't need a long explanation.

I needed a source.

One person.

One reason to believe this story had started somewhere other than Jordan's own mouth.

But I didn't have one.

Pam had heard something frightening from her son.

She had believed him.

I understood that part.

People believe family members every day.

Sometimes they do it before they ask the obvious questions.

I had made that mistake myself.

Still, there was a difference between concern and proof.

Pam's concern was real.

I could see that.

The gambling accusation was something else.

I hadn't been given any reason to accept it.

I looked at the two people in front of me.

My wife.

Her son.

Two people whose words mattered in my home.

I found myself thinking about how quickly a claim could become a fact in somebody else's mind.

Jordan had spoken.

Pam had worried.

And somewhere between those two things, I had become a man supposedly gambling away everything he owned.

I hadn't even known that was the picture being painted of me.

That bothered me more than I wanted to admit.

Because when you don't know what people believe about you, you don't know what they might do because of it.

I was starting to understand how little I knew about the conversations that had already taken place.

I also understood that anger wouldn't answer my questions.

If I raised my voice, the conversation might turn into an argument.

Then everybody could talk about how upset I was instead of why Jordan had made the accusation.

I didn't want that.

I wanted facts.

I had spent too many years making decisions about property to be satisfied with somebody's vague recollection.

A financial claim needed to be checked.

Especially one involving supposed debts.

Especially one serious enough to frighten my wife.

But Jordan had offered nothing I could verify.

I thought about Oklahoma.

I thought about the way Pam had repeated what she had heard.

And I thought about that missing name.

The person Jordan apparently couldn't identify.

Maybe he had genuinely forgotten.

I couldn't rule that out simply because I was angry.

But forgetting the source didn't make his story reliable.

That was the distinction I needed to hold on to.

I was not prepared to accuse him of more than I could establish.

I was equally unwilling to accept what he had said without evidence.

For the time being, the story remained exactly that.

A story.

And I wasn't going to make a decision about my money based on it.

Click here to continue reading: PART 3: While My Wife Worried I Was About to Lose Everything, I Was Keeping a Sale Worth Millions to Myself