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Meg
July
Seventeen Weeks before the Election
Let’s talk about Kat for a moment. Young, flush with new money, adrift and unsure of the direction her life should be taking.
Also, a pretty accomplished liar.
From the moment she called me, claiming to be a referral from Ron, I suspected Kat wasn’t who she said she was, and I confirmed it by following her home shortly after our first outing together. I sat in my car outside her duplex and watched her neighbor, a young woman in her late twenties who smiled at three different people between the front door of the building and her car.
My favorite kind of person.
“Hey,” I said to her the next morning as we waited in line at Starbucks. “You’re Kat and Scott’s neighbor, right?”
She looked at me, her eyes bright and trusting. “Yes,” she said.
“I knew I recognized you!” My delight at the connection became hers. “I’ve always loved your building,” I confided. “How long have you lived there?”
The woman furrowed her brow, thinking. “Three years maybe? I moved in right before Scott.”
The line inched forward. “Scott’s such a doll. I wish they’d set a date already. Did Kat tell you how they met?”
The woman smiled. “Of course. Very sweet.”
“What are the chances though?” Vague questions implying knowledge can yield a lot.
She shrugged. “I remember Kat saying something about meeting Scott on a case, but I don’t remember the details. I’m sure on most of his fraud investigations, there would be journalists involved as well.”
My stomach slid sideways. Even though I’d suspected Kat wasn’t who she said she was, I didn’t expect a reporter and a fraud detective. I kept my tone thoughtful, as if I were trying to remember something. “Didn’t he work on her last story too?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “To be honest, I can’t recall the last big piece she did. I think it was a while ago. But I’m sure if you Google Kat Roberts, it’ll all come up.”
Kat Roberts.Not Reynolds. I marveled for a moment at the similarities between us—each fully ourselves, with only a few select details swapped out. It’s not easy to inhabit a facsimile of yourself, and despite my racing heart and sweaty palms, I could still appreciate how well she did it.
“What can I get for you?” the barista asked me.
“Black coffee, please.” Whatever would get me out of there the fastest. To Kat’s neighbor I said, “It was really great running into you!”
She smiled as she slid up to the counter to take her turn, and I grabbed my coffee and hurried out, as if I had somewhere important to be.
Instinct is a funny thing, a whisper of trouble that we can never quite name, never quite define, that allows us to locate danger. Women are taught from a young age to ignore theirs. We’re forced to justify our instincts with evidence, or we’re taught to ignore them—as a way to keep the peace, to prioritize other people’s comfort over our own.
It’s taken me a long time to override those impulses. To pay attention when something seems off. And my instincts weren’t wrong about Kat. The inheritance story was a good one—impossible for an outsider to verify—but it lacked the background details that might have fooled me for longer. An inheritance large enough to purchase a home in Los Angeles would show up in your life in other, smaller ways. Maybe as a new car, or nicer clothes. Jewelry. Even expensive highlights from the salon. But Kat had none of those things. She drove a ten-year-old Honda. Her yoga wear was from Old Navy, not Lululemon. Her makeup was from Sephora, not Neiman Marcus.
My mind began circling through ways to cut her loose. Become too busy to show her any more properties. Avoid her calls and texts, build a wall that would keep Kat separated from what I was planning.
But then my instincts kicked in. Casting her aside wouldn’t stop her. She’d continue to target me, follow me, possibly feeding information to Scott. But if I held her close, I could control the narrative. Make sure the only things she saw were curated by me. So I made her my assistant instead.
I’m not a fool. I know Kat plans to write about me, exposing who I am and what I do. I see beneath her soft sympathy and the delicate questions she’s likely known the answers to for years. But I have a plan too, and Kat will be a useful part of it.
It’ll be easy to pull her in and feed her the pieces I need her to have. And because she’ll be so close, it’ll be impossible for her to see the whole picture. Like standing under the Eiffel Tower—when you’re inside of it, it’s just a bunch of crisscrossed steel. It’s only from a distance you can see it for what it really is.
