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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.”
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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.
