The Lies I Tell(49)

I turn to face her. “So Ron’s house,” I prompt. “It would be great to get that listing.”

Meg gives me a smile and says, “It’s a great house.”

It’s your house, I want to say.

She crosses her arms and continues, “I might have the perfect buyers for it. I’ll have Veronica plant the seed first and then bring it up with Ron.”

I give her a sharp look. “Can you represent both ends of the deal?”

“Technically? Yes, though some consider it a little shady. Fiduciary duty, and all that. But my thinking is that we can probably keep it off the market and get a quick sale if my buyers can make a competitive offer. I doubt Ron will be excited about open houses twice a week.”

The valet pulls her car forward, and she hands him a tip.

“I didn’t realize you had new buying clients,” I say, wondering where she’s picked them up. She doesn’t do any of the things other new agents have to do, like door knocking or open houses. “Who are they?”

She gives me a tight smile and says, “Can’t disclose, sorry. They’re industry people and want to remain anonymous.” Before I can ask where she found them, she checks her phone for the time. “And I’m late. Chat later?”

She slides behind the wheel and is gone within seconds, leaving me standing there, thinking through all the ways this could be the beginning of her plan.

***

I arrive home just after one o’clock, eager to research the ways a listing agent could manipulate a sale. Especially one that never hits the market.

I settle at my desk and open my computer, typing the parameters into the search bar. My computer is slow to load, so I get up and grab a Diet Coke from the kitchen. When I return, the page is still blank.

Cannot load page. Check your internet connection and try again.

I look to our router, which is blinking green, and try again. Still nothing.

I move into the living room to see if our cable is working. Maybe there’s an outage. I turn on the TV and am greeted by a black screen.

“Shit.” Back in our office, I pull out the box where Scott and I put things we want to shred and dig out an old bill. I dial our cable company and punch my way through several automated choices, until I finally get a live person on the line. “Yes, I’d like to report an outage,” I say.

“Zip code?” a woman’s voice asks.

I offer it and hear her typing in the background. Finally, she says, “I’m not seeing any outages in your area.”

“Well, there has to be, since neither my internet or my cable are working.” I look out the window, as if I might see a pole fallen down into the middle of the street. But everything looks normal.

“What’s your account number?” she asks.

I read off the number from the statement and wait. Finally, she says, “I’m going to connect you with an account manager who will be able to help you.”

I’m on hold again, and I return to the box to find the cable statements, going back five months—all with the bottom portion torn off, presumably paid. But a small voice in my head reminds me that gamblers are very good at deception.

The account manager comes on the line, and I run through the situation again, feeling a headache build behind my eyes. Finally, she says, “Your account is sixty days past due, so service has been turned off. You can pay right now with a credit card, or come into our office with a money order. The total due to resume service is $473.94.”

I collapse on the couch and close my eyes.

“Ms. Roberts?” the woman prompts. “What would you like to do?”

“I’ll pay with a credit card,” I say.

***

As soon as I’m done, I call Scott’s cell.

“I just paid over $400 to reconnect our cable and internet,” I say when he answers.

“What?” Scott says.

“Why didn’t you pay the bill?”

“I did pay the bill.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Scott. It was sixty days late.”

Scott blows out hard and says, “Look. I admit, I lost track of one month. Thought I’d paid it, but I didn’t. But when the next bill came and I realized I hadn’t, I paid it then. In full.”

“Well, that’s funny, because when I spoke to them on the phone just now, they never got the payment.”

“You know, if you’d let me pay the bills online like every other fucking person in the world, this wouldn’t have happened.”

“Don’t turn this around on me,” I say. “We agreed, along with Dr. Carter, that online payments of any kind could be a trigger for you. Keeping your financial stuff offline is the best way to protect your recovery.” Before he can argue with me, I push on. “What concerns me more is that you put the stubs in the box anyway, making it appear as if you’d paid them. It’s not that you forgot; we all get busy. But it’s the way you worked to conceal it that’s the problem.”

“Because I knew you’d turn it into something it wasn’t.”

I stare out the window, feeling unsettled. Scott’s story makes sense. There’s been no evidence of gambling. His phone and computer are consistently clean. He’s always where he says he’ll be, and I’m more likely to be in front of my computer in the middle of the night than he is. When he’d shown me the new bank statement he’d requested the other week, there’d been no unusual activity. The balance had been lower than I’d hoped, but there weren’t any large cash withdrawals or any of the other red flags that would indicate he wasn’t doing exactly what he said he was—working the program.