Pushing Perfect(68)

“Brick wall,” I told Alex.

“That was fast.” She was typing as quickly as ever, and all three of her screens had documents on them, some of them with numbers down the left side.

I peered closer and saw that they were from courts. She’d found the lawsuit and the divorce decree, which was from just a couple of years ago. “‘It is therefore ordered that the marriage of Jonathan and Samantha Fisher be dissolved,’” I read. “Jonathan Fisher. He’s the ex. I win!”

“How do you win? I’m the one who found that doc,” Alex protested. “And we don’t even know for sure that it’s them.”

“You might have found it, but you haven’t read it yet.”

“That is totally not how this contest works. Proof first, then the win.”

“Okay, but what should I do about the social media stuff? Can you hack into her accounts?”

She frowned. “I could, but it would take forever, and there’s got to be a better way to find out what we need to know.”

I thought about it for a minute. “I’ll look for pictures where she’s tagged. Everyone screws up their privacy stuff every once in a while, right? And then I’ll see if her ex is online too.”

“Worth a shot,” she said, and turned back to her screens.

I got back online and did a search for pictures, and I hit pay dirt fast: a whole bunch of photos from a couple of years ago and beyond, posted by her ex. And in one of them, Ms. Davenport was wearing a wedding dress.

“We found the right guy,” I said. “I win!”

“You couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t found the divorce stuff,” she said. “I’ll take the draw, though.”

As much as I liked winning, I liked how much fun it was working with her, as a team. “Okay, fine.”

“Excellent. Now let me see him.”

Alex looked over my shoulder and we went through the photos. Ms. Davenport’s husband was good-looking, though he was completely different than what I’d have expected. He had short, neatly styled brown hair and wore suits or business-casual clothes in all the photos. In a way, he kind of looked like my dad. “I’d have thought she’d be married to a hipster,” I said.

“Totally,” Alex said. “And he’s older than I thought.”

We looked at his profile, which was completely open. He was a banker who lived in San Francisco, thirty-five years old, and from what we could tell, he and Ms. Davenport had gotten married eight years ago. The big surprise, though, was seeing his most recent photos. Most of them were pictures of a baby. And not a newborn, either—the baby was a few months old.

“Whoa,” Alex said as we scrolled through his timeline. There was another wedding picture there, from just over a year ago. “So he got married less than a year after the divorce?”

“Looks that way,” I said. “And either the new wife was pregnant already or it happened pretty quick.”

“Ms. Davenport must have been furious. Unless this was some crazy whirlwind thing, this guy was cheating on her.”

“That sucks,” I said. For a minute, I tried to imagine what it might have been like, to be Ms. Davenport. To be married to a banker who clearly had a lot of money—his cover photo was of his house in San Francisco, and it was gorgeous—and then to have it all end, most likely in an awful way. With all those nursing home and mortgage payments, I bet she was broke, while her husband was living it up with a new young wife and baby. “She must be so angry. Maybe it made her crazy.”

“I’d say it’s understandable, except most people who are mad about getting divorced do things like sell their husband’s fancy cars on Craigslist for pocket change, or try to hook up with one of their husband’s friends. At least that’s what they do on TV. I don’t think they start crazy blackmail schemes.”

“I know. I’m not saying it makes sense. It’s more that she must have felt so betrayed. Someone she trusted, going behind her back like that.” I knew how she felt. Her betrayal had gutted me; ironic that the feelings of hurt and anger were helping me understand her better now.

“So she turned around and did the same thing to us? Don’t get soft on me now.”

“I’m not.” And I wasn’t, really. But there was this moment when I could see where someone could just lose it and do things they’d never thought they were capable of. Which didn’t make it okay. Just because I got how this could happen didn’t mean I was any less angry. I still wanted her to pay.

And I wanted to find a way to end this nightmare.

We plugged away, me searching through Jonathan Fisher’s timeline, Alex using his name to see if she could come up with a connection to the house. “I’ve got it,” Alex said. “It’s easy now that we know her married name—it looks like she used it for everything but work. The lawsuit was filed against her by her mom. Said she tricked her grandmother into signing everything over to her before she went into the home, and then took out a second mortgage on the house.”

“She’s being sued by her own mother?”

“Isn’t that the worst? Here we are thinking our parents are going to have fits over the stupid things we’ve been doing, and Ms. Davenport’s actually in a lawsuit with hers.”