It’s always this way with my mother, her insistence on dragging me along, chasing her dreams instead of my own. “She doesn’t appear to have had anything to do with it,” I tell her. “All the reports I’m seeing point to some kind of restitution for something that happened a long time ago. But Ron Ashton’s not talking to anyone.”
“Now’s the time to tell her who you are and what you want. You have a relationship with her. Promise to protect her identity in exchange for full access. A story like this will open every door for you.”
I look at the notebooks containing everything Meg could possibly tell me. “Meg’s gone,” I say. “I don’t know where she went.”
My mother exhales, a sharp sound that carries so much with it—blame, disappointment, impatience—familiar criticisms I’ve grown to expect. “All that time,” she says. “Wasted.”
“It wasn’t wasted.” I think about what Meg gave me. Not just the notebooks, not just the money to cover Scott’s debt, but clarity.
I found the pages that outlined her exit from Cory Dempsey’s life. An idea, jotted at the bottom of a page. Call Times re: Nate’s involvement. She couldn’t have known that the young reporter who’d answered the phone would do something so foolish. Context matters.
Blaming Meg for the lie that put me in Nate’s path was just a circumstance of chance, no more useful than blaming a lightning storm for a forest fire. Everything burned to a black pile of ash, until new growth can begin to emerge.
“Now that Scott’s not keeping you in Los Angeles, you can relocate. My friend Michael told me he heard about a fact-checker position at the San Francisco Chronicle. Work hard and in six months you might finally get back to where you left off all those years ago.”
My mother will never change. Never stop yearning for what she lost. But it’s not my responsibility to give that to her. “I have to go,” I tell her, “but I’ll consider it.”
After I hang up, I think back to the fundraiser nearly five months ago and what I thought I wanted. You only get one life—how do you want to live it?
I have some ideas.
Epilogue—Kat
December
I take a final lap around my apartment, now empty. All my furniture has been either sold or donated, my remaining belongings packed in my car. Clothes, photos, laptop, and Meg’s notebooks.
When I first started investigating Meg, I thought I knew who I was looking for—a master manipulator, an accomplished liar and chameleon. All the research I’ve done about con artists depict people with an innate ability to trick and obfuscate to their own advantage.
Meg Williams was all of these things. But she was also so much more.
Unlike most con artists, Meg wasn’t a sociopath. She was just another woman exhausted by the way the system seems to always fail us. She targeted corrupt men, skipping over smaller marks, refusing to take advantage of opportunities that might have been an easy win for her. Instead, she focused on people like the professor who plagiarized the work of his female colleague. A nephew stealing his aunt’s retirement. A high school principal and former math teacher who preyed on young girls. An ex-husband who didn’t know how to share.
Of course, Meg had choices and options. She could have saved her money and gone to community college, as her friend Cal had wanted her to do. I found Cal, living in Morro Bay with his partner, Robert. When I asked him if he had any words for Meg, he simply said, “I hope she knows how much she was loved.”
This seems to be the refrain from most of the people Meg encountered. Not the people she stole from, but the people she befriended along the way, the people who gave her access to her targets. I can’t tell you how unusual this is for a con artist. Typically, grifters are nothing more than empty shells, lying and manipulating their way toward whatever end goal they have in mind, leaving friends and neighbors hurt and angry if they’re lucky, destitute if they’re not. But Meg was different.