Pushing Perfect(57)

“I found something,” Alex said. “This house has a really weird history. Those first listings are way out of date—there’s some sort of lawsuit happening. It looks like someone got Nora Sinclair’s power of attorney and tried to sell the house, and someone else is trying to block the sale.”

“Any names?”

“None that look familiar. You having any luck?”

“Nothing when I search people, like you thought. I’m going through photos now.” I kept clicking through the list, hoping to find someone old. Finally, I saw a picture of a woman who could be the right age. There was a middle-aged woman standing next to her, and the caption read, “Getting my mother-in-law ready for the nursing home,” with a sad face emoticon. “This could be it.” I showed Alex.

“Whose page is it?”

“Barbara Sinclair.”

“That’s a bummer. Doesn’t match any of the names in the lawsuit.” She spun around in her desk chair and groaned. “We’re not getting anywhere.”

I looked at the picture again and saw a location tag for Palo Alto. “I think it’s her,” I told Alex. “How many Nora Sinclairs are headed for Bay Area nursing homes?”

“Okay, so let’s say it’s her,” Alex said. “Now we know she doesn’t live in the house anymore. It’s nothing we can use.”

“We still might find something later tonight,” I said. “We can’t give up hope yet.”

“I know. This is just all so depressing, though.”

Depressing? I couldn’t help but think that if Alex was right about having set up her whole financial empire in a way that would keep her from getting caught, then most of us had it way worse than she did. And “depressing” wasn’t really the word I’d use to describe what was happening here. She seemed more upset and angry than scared, which didn’t quite make sense. I wondered what was really going on. Maybe it was time to find out. “Listen, I know you said you didn’t want to talk about this yet, but I’d assumed that you and Justin weren’t super close. But as soon as you found out he was involved—”

“I flipped out?” She grinned. “Yeah, I know it must have seemed extreme.”

“Well, not entirely. I mean, he is the one who sold most of us out. But it did seem like more than that.”

“I’m not even a little bit convinced that he didn’t sell me out too,” she said. “But you’re right that there’s more to it. I’ve known Justin since preschool. We’ve been friends my whole life. We were inseparable—that whole thing I told you about me not having many girl friends? That’s because Justin was pretty much my only friend growing up. I didn’t think I needed anyone else. And I thought he didn’t either—even when we started high school and we both got into guys, we were more in it to have fun. We had a great time, but we always had each other, and that was more important. Things shifted a little when Raj moved here—they had some classes together and Justin’s always been into soccer, so they bonded right away, and for a little while we were a threesome.”

I thought about triangle friendships, and seesaw friendships, and I wondered whether Justin felt like he’d been in the middle, like Becca had. But Alex and Raj seemed to have their own friendship, so maybe there was more balance. “Was that okay? Was it hard having things not just be the two of you?”

“That’s the thing—it wasn’t bad at all. It made me wonder why we’d been so against hanging out with other people. Raj is really great, and we’d have movie nights at his house, and go to parties together, and it was fun. But then Justin met this Mark person, though of course I had no idea who it was at the time, and he basically disappeared. It was like he’d made friends with Raj so I’d have someone to hang out with when he bailed on me.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t like that,” I said, though I understood why she might have thought so.

“I know. That’s just how it felt.”

“Did you talk to him about it?”

“I tried. He just said I needed to grow up, which really pissed me off. We had a huge fight and didn’t talk for a while, and eventually we got to where we could be civil and hang out in groups, but it’s not the same. I really miss him.” I could hear the anger in her voice fading to sadness.

“I know what you mean,” I said. “It’s not the same thing, but I told you I used to hang out with Isabel and Becca. Becca was my best friend, but she was best friends with Isabel too—the three of us were kind of a trio, but it was more that Isabel and I were friendly because we both wanted to be around Becca.”

“What happened? I remember you said there was a blowup.”

“It was my fault,” I said. “I screwed it up. I wasn’t a very good friend, and I wasn’t honest. They finally decided they’d had enough of me.” That was pretty much it, really. The details didn’t matter. I felt a pang of embarrassment remembering our argument out on the lawn in front of that party, and another remembering Isabel telling me that they’d known about the monster, had known all along. It made me look back at everything differently.

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, you’ve never been like that with me.”

Except that of course I had. “I’m trying to be better.”