feel good to see you like this: that you’d finally gotten what you deserved. But it doesn’t.” She turns back to me. “Your neighbor Lisa, she told me you were arrested for grand theft.”
“Antiques,” I say. “I stole antiques from a Russian billionaire.”
She furrows her brow. “Is that what you were going to do to me? Steal my antiques?”
I shrug. “Tell me why you’re here and I’ll tell you what we had planned.”
“We.” Her face turns the color of nonfat milk. “You and Michael. You were in it…together?”
I hesitate for only a second: Do I throw him under the bus? Then again, he already sold me out. “His name’s not really Michael. Does that answer your question?”
She nods. She slowly draws her hands out of her lap and sets them flat on the table in between us. And that’s when I see it: the emerald engagement ring, on her left hand.
“Oh no,” I say, realizing.
“Oh yes,” she says, stiff as cardboard. “And here’s another fun fact: I’m pregnant.”
I’m shocked into silence. We both stare at her hand on the table, the pale skin of her fingers, my mother’s fake ring looking garish and out of place against the worn lino. What have I done?
“What’s his real name?” she finally asks. “If he used a false identity when I married him, the marriage isn’t real, right? It’s illegitimate?”
I think about this for a long time. Do I even know his real name? With all the slippery lies I saw him tell, I never thought to wonder whether he was lying to me, too.
“Bail me out of here,” I say, “and I’ll help you find out.”
* * *
—
Lachlan’s apartment is a blank beige box: a generic stucco condo in a big complex in West Hollywood, the kind of place where the walls are thick and no one speaks to their neighbors. I’ve only been here a handful of times over the years: Lachlan usually came to me, which I always assumed was out of respect for my need to be near my mother. Now I wonder if this had more to do with his own desire for secrecy.
I am back in the clothes that I was arrested in: the clothes I was wearing when I drove away from Stonehaven that November morning. The shirt is still powdery-smelling from the deodorant I was wearing that day, the pants still stained from the coffee I spilled in the car. My clothes are baggy on me now; they feel like the costume of a stranger. After nearly two months in county jail, the sun is blindingly bright, the air so sweet that it’s almost painful to breathe.
I direct Vanessa to park her SUV down the street from Lachlan’s apartment, just to be safe, and then we walk the rest of the way to the complex. Vanessa trails a half step behind me as we walk between the buildings, her eyes darting left and right as if expecting Lachlan to leap out from behind a stand of oleander. Palm trees keen softly in the wind, lost fronds curling at their feet like plucked feathers.
“Where does Lachlan think you are, anyway?” I ask.
“I told him I was going to visit my brother.”
“Benny. How is he doing, anyway?”
She keeps her eyes fixed on the sidewalk, gingerly avoiding the blackened nubs of long-abandoned gum that pepper the asphalt. “Up and down. He was doing better, but lately he’s been having trouble again.” A slight hesitation. “Since he heard you were back, actually. He’s been rather fixated on seeing you again. He tried to break out of his institution to go look for you. In Portland.”
I hear a jab in the emphasis she puts on this last word, but I choose to ignore it. My heart twists at the thought of Benny, fruitlessly trying to hunt me down. Poor Benny. “Maybe I can go visit him, after.”
She gives me a sideways look, full of distrust. “You’d do that?”
“Of course.” The thought fills me with lightness, in fact: to be wanted. It is something