The Lies I Tell(40)

“I like the company though.” Which is truer than I care to admit. Meg always has stories to tell—about deals that almost fell through, a client with absurd requests—a wine cellar and a sex toy room, if you can find it. I don’t believe a word of any of them, but a part of me is impressed with how well she’s developed her backstory. How easy it might be for someone who didn’t already know who and what she was to believe her. This is how people like Meg operate. They build an incredible fantasy world, and when you’re living inside of it, you stop caring about what’s real and what’s not.

“I’m kind of relieved, to be honest,” Meg says. “The houses at this price point are depressing. I wouldn’t have wanted you to spend your money on any of them.”

Back in the car, we pull away from the curb and head back toward the Beverly Hills Apex office where my car is parked. “Perspective is a funny thing,” she says. “My mother would have killed to have lived in any one of those houses. I would have too.”

About a year ago I wrote a piece for an online psychology blog titled “Ten Simple Ways to Build Trust,” and I’ve been employing as many of them as I can. Things like being on time, mirroring her body language, and being generous with my own information, like my confession about Scott. All of it leading up to my next question. “What exactly happened?” I ask, hoping she’s ready to answer. “You mentioned that you lost your home?”

“It’s a cliché, really. My mother fell in love with the wrong guy,” she says, keeping her eyes on the road as she talks. “Her biggest regret was getting involved with him, and for what he put me through.”

“Did he…?” I trail off.

“No, nothing like that. He barely looked at me. I was awkward and bookish and mostly hid in my room when he was over. But because of him, we lost our home. Our family history, really. There’s only so much you can take with you when you’re living in your car.”

“Did your mother have any legal recourse?”

Meg shakes her head and looks over her shoulder to change lanes. “My mother barely had a quarter for the pay phone. She was terminally ill. By the time any of that got sorted out, she would have already been dead.”

“How did he do it?” We still haven’t named him, and I’m careful not to reveal that I know it’s Ron we’re talking about.

She’s quiet, and I worry I pushed too far. But then she says, “My mom needed to refinance the house—get cash out of it. But her credit was shit. She couldn’t secure a loan on her own, so he offered to cosign in exchange for putting him on the title.”

I sit up straighter, intuiting where this is going. Meg must see my expression because she says, “I know. She believed him when he said they could co-own it. He’d do all the repairs—and believe me, it needed a lot. There was mold in the downstairs library. Earthquake damage from the ’94 quake that never got addressed. He said he’d fix it at no cost and then they could either rent it out or sell it, and split the profits. It would have been a life-changing amount of money for us.”

“But that’s not what happened?”

Meg shakes her head. “He spun some story about how the banks wouldn’t allow him to refinance the loan so long as she was on the title. ‘Forty-five days,’ he told her. ‘Just long enough to secure the loan. Then we’ll put you right back on the title.’”

“That’s not how it works,” I say, remembering a case Scott worked on several years ago, a young man who convinced his elderly grandmother to do something similar and then sold the house out from under her to fund his drug habit. “Banks don’t care who’s on the title; they only care who’s on the loan.”

She looks grim. “I know that now. But back then? I was just a kid and my mother was in over her head.” She’s quiet for a moment and then says, “That was the hardest year of my life, living in our car with my mother. She tried to make it feel like this big adventure—‘We can go anywhere we want, on a moment’s notice’—but the reality was, we cycled through beach parking lots and the occasional shelter. In the fall of my senior year of high school, my mom got sick. Urgent care sent her to the ER and…” She trails off. “It was pretty fast after that. By Christmas, she was gone.”

All the ways I’ve pictured what could have happened to push Meg and her mother out of their home, I never imagined this. A part of me wishes I’d never asked, because it’s hard not to empathize with her. To imagine a younger Meg and her mother, sleeping in their car, knowing the man responsible for putting them there lived in their home. Still lives there to this day. I can’t pretend this is another one of her stories, because enough of the pieces fit with what I already know. “I’m so sorry,” I say.

Meg shrugs. “It was a long time ago. Time to move on, you know?”

This is a lie. This is why Meg has returned.

“How do you not want to kill him? Or make him pay somehow?” My words hang there, an invitation.

“Men and accountability,” she says. “They rarely go together.”

We travel in silence for a few blocks before she says, “What’s next for you? If not a new house, then what?”

“I’ll have to find something else to fill my days,” I say, though I’m having trouble moving past what Meg has just told me. The rage that must have consumed her for so many years, bringing us to this moment.