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I was unable to speak for a moment, Meg’s generosity unexpected, and yet, not surprising. Sure, she’d kept Phillip’s cash. But she balanced the scales. Gave back to Celia a little bit of the power Phillip had stolen, and exposed him in the process. The same thing she’d done for Kristen. What she was trying to do now for her mother and for herself.
“The incredible thing,” Celia continued, “is that right before all of this happened, I’d resigned myself to getting nothing. I was ready to quit. To let Phillip keep it all.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Divorce is like a virus. It invades every corner of your life, every thought and every moment. Everything is viewed through the lens of how will this benefit or harm my settlement. It’s toxic.”
“But you’d have given up a lot of money,” I pressed.
“How much is your freedom worth to you?”
***
I’m still trying to answer that question. It’s a complicated shame to have someone you trust deceive you, the pain of that betrayal compounded by the unraveling of the life you thought you’d have. The removal of their belongings, the empty spaces left behind to remind you of all you never saw. Telling friends and family, the phone calls and texts where you have to carry everyone else’s regrets alongside your own. Which is why the only person I’ve told so far is Jenna.
She’d said all the right things, been outraged on my behalf. “I hope you’ve gone to the police.”
First, I had to drop the charges Scott filed against Meg.
***
I sit on hold for fifteen minutes before I get someone on the line.
“Hi, I filed a police report a few weeks ago, but there was a misunderstanding, and I want to drop it.”
“Case number?”
I read it off and am ready to wait while she looks it up, but she says, “That’s not a case number. It’s generally a ten-digit number, found in the upper right corner of your copy of the police report.”
I look at the report Scott had brought home for me to sign. Eight digits and a letter.
“Let me call you back,” I tell her.
Of course, there was never a real police report. If he’d actually filed one, the investigation would have eventually cleared Meg and implicated him. But a bigger realization keeps me from being angry about another lie. No police report means I’m still the only person who knows who Meg is and what she’s doing.
I grab my phone and text Meg, hoping it’s not too late. That she isn’t already gone. Thanks for giving me the space I needed to sort things out on my end. I’m ready to get back to work.
But my phone stays silent. I get up and go into the kitchen to grab a soda, and when I return, I decide to read through my notes from Celia and Renata, trying to see a thread between what Meg did to Phillip Montgomery and what she might have done to Ron. A forged inspection report? A falsified appraisal? Pretending to be private buyers guarding their identity, and then possibly stealing the Canyon Drive property back. I can’t even be sure that the sale price was $4.5 million. Meg could have told me anything, knowing that information wouldn’t be public for weeks.
It might help if I can see everything in order, starting with Cory Dempsey, moving through Phillip, and then adding what I’ve got so far with Ron. I also want to take another look at the few victims I’d been able to find shortly after Meg left Los Angeles the first time. Dig a little deeper to see whether they, too, deserved Meg’s attention the way Cory did. The way Phillip did. The way Ron does now.
I pull the file from my desk drawer and open it. A blank piece of paper sits on top of the stack. I set it aside and am faced with another blank sheet. My hands begin to shake as I start flipping through the pages, blank page after blank page, my mind finally catching up to what’s happened.
Scott.
While I sat in my car waiting for him to clear out, he was stealing my notes and replacing them with a fat stack of printer paper.
Everything I’ve gathered about Meg—names, dates, former addresses, and family information—is gone. Ten years’ worth of work has vanished, and any chance I might have had to sell the story and pay the debt. Rage pounds through me, and I grab my soda can and throw it against the wall, where it explodes in a cascade of brown bubbles, puddling on the hardwood floor.
