My Debt Your Downfall

Summary

Coming back to this exact moment—this familiar, jagged edge of my life—the first thing I decided was that I would not spend another second drowning in debt to pay for my mother’s cancer treatment.

In my previous life, that choice cost me everything. I had mentioned, perhaps too loudly, that I’d managed to scrape together nearly half a million dollars in savings. That was all it took for the new intern to mark me. She’d used a predatory digital "tethering" exploit—a glitch in the banking app she’d bragged about—to link our accounts.