The Good Girl's Guide to Bad Men (10 page)

I have seen a lot of things in this job. But nothing had prepared me for what I was about to encounter.

The girl who stepped into my office couldn't have been older than twelve. Maybe thirteen. But her eyes reflected the life experience of a forty-year-old. She was small and slender; the oversize black-and-red backpack that was strapped to her shoulders looked as if it weighed twice as much as she did. She had scratches on both sides of her face, the kind you get from climbing trees, scaling forbidden walls, or playing touch football with the boys during recess. Under any other circumstances, I would have found the entire situation endearing in a way. A young girl, out on her own in the big city of Los Angeles with nothing but her backpack and her tough-girl scars. But at that moment, all I could think was,
What on earth is she doing here?

I was too speechless to invite her to sit down, but it quickly became apparent that she didn't require an invitation. She sauntered through the doorway with poise and confidence and immediately took a seat on the white chenille couch in the corner of the room. Then she shimmied out of the straps of the oversize backpack and placed it by her feet. She looked up at me, her face showing no signs of distress or anxiety. Those were the expressions I was used to seeing on that couch. But then again, this obviously wasn't just another eleven o'clock meeting. This promised to be something far more complicated.

At first I was convinced that she was in the wrong place. Dialed the wrong phone number, written the address down wrong.

So I decided to play dumb. It was the only way I could get her to tell me what she was doing here without having to divulge any real information about the agency. I smiled politely, grabbed my notepad, and took a seat on the matching white armchair that faced the couch. "Hi," I said brightly, coming out of my speechless trance. "How are you?"

Her face revealed nothing. She didn't return my smile. Nor did she respond to my attempt to make small talk. She simply stared straight into my eyes without a trace of fear or apprehension and in an unforgiving tone said, "I know what you're thinking, but trust me, I have good reason to be here."

I swallowed hard and struggled to maintain my plastered-on smile. "And what might that be?" The only comfort I was able to give myself was my certainty that the question would be returned with something completely unrelated to the subject of infidelity. Or any other word spoken on a regular basis within these walls.

But apparently I was wrong.

"I need you to prove that my dad is a cheater."

I coughed loudly, choking on my own disbelief. "Excuse me," I managed to get out after I'd finished hacking up an imaginary chicken bone caught in my throat. "What did you say?"

"Let's just cut the bullshit," she said in all seriousness. "I know exactly what it is you do here."

I glanced nervously down at my notes. "
You
are Lexi Garrett?"

The small-framed girl who occupied my couch nodded confidently. "Yep, that's me."

I still couldn't believe what I was sitting across from. That couch was usually reserved for suspicious fiancés, distrustful wives and husbands, maybe the occasional long-term girlfriend with serious doubts in the back of her mind. But never anyone like this.

"And, how old are you?" I asked, trying to figure out how this girl even managed to get an appointment. Hadley was instructed never to ask for specific details over the phone, but she
had
to have at least heard how young she sounded.

"I'm almost thirteen," she said proudly, as if this were some kind of major accomplishment. And I'm sure for an almost thirteen-year-old, it was. But for me, it was like a stake in my heart.

"Uh-huh," I said, staring at her as if I were seeing a child for the very first time. Well, for all intents and purposes it
was
the first time. The first time in this office, no doubt. Not even my niece, Hannah, who had just turned fourteen, had ever been allowed to step foot in here, let alone know about what it is we actually do. "And why aren't you in school?"

Lexi shrugged. "I forged a doctor's note."

I coughed again, grasping at my throat like a choking victim. "Wow, it must be really dry in here. I think I need some water. Do you want some water?"

The girl shook her head as I jumped up and practically dived for the intercom on my desk. "Hadley, would you mind bringing us a few bottles of water?"

"No problem," her voice came obligingly back through the speaker.

I sat back down in the armchair, shifting restlessly in an effort to get comfortable. But I knew it was probably a futile attempt. There was nothing
comforting
about any of this.

"So, um . . ." I struggled to find the right words. Did they even exist? Somehow I doubted it. "How did you hear about . . . the . . . um . . ."

"About the Hawthorne Agency?" she completed my thought, and I felt a small shiver run up my spine.

"Yes."

"From my best friend, Elisa," she said matter-of-factly. "Her mom hired you guys about six months ago. Elisa overheard her mom telling her aunt that you completely changed her life. I need you to do that for my mom."

"So your mom knows that you're here?" I asked, half hoping and half dreading that it was the truth. Because as much as I wanted to think that this girl didn't come here to interfere with her parents' marriage on her own accord, I wasn't exactly thrilled at the idea of a mother sending her
child
to hire a fidelity inspector, either.

"Hell, no," Lexi replied. "She would never do anything like this. And that's the problem. They've been together since they were eighteen. She doesn't know anything else but him. And she trusts him so blindly. She's clueless! She goes through life with her eyes closed. She doesn't see any of the signs."

"And what signs would that be?" I asked, a chiding condescendence seeping into my voice.

Lexi rolled her eyes at me, clearly losing her patience. "The signs of a cheater!"

I nodded slowly, trying to absorb the words that were coming out of this young girl's mouth. "But
you've
seen them?" I asked doubtfully. "These . . . signs."

"Yes! They're
so
obvious. He works a lot. Or so he says. One night he came home at like eleven-thirty and he totally smelled like a bar. I think he's out prowling for chicks with his friend Rob, who just got divorced.
And,"
she continued dramatically, waving her finger in front of her face to make her point. "He's always texting on his stupid little BlackBerry. Like
all
the time. And I've heard him talking on the phone at two in the morning when my mom is asleep. He's talking to a girl. I just know it."

Hadley entered quietly, balancing two bottles of SmartWater and two glasses of ice on a tray. I bypassed the glass and went straight for the bottle, unscrewing the top and swallowing half of it in one long gulp. "Thanks," I said breathlessly as she slipped back out the door.

"Well, Lexi," I began, uncouthly wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. "Adult relationships are complicated, and sometimes things may not
seem
appropriate to childr— I mean, to
younger
people. But—"

"Trust me," she insisted. "Something's just not right. I can
feel
it."

"I'm not doubting your instincts," I continued warily, feeling extremely awkward having this conversation with someone else's daughter. "But isn't there a chance that your father really is just working late and that maybe he's using his BlackBerry for work purposes?"

"No," she replied blankly. "If he had the opportunity to cheat on her, he would. If he hasn't already. They've been together for too long, and he's bored with her. Some things you just know."

The resolve in the young girl's voice startled me slightly, and I felt myself taking a deep breath in an attempt to recover my slipping patience. "Well, have you talked to your mom about your concerns?"

She rolled her eyes again. "Hundreds of times. She won't listen. She thinks he's a saint. She doesn't even believe me when I try to tell her about the late night phone calls. She says I watch too much
Gossip Girl."

"Well, perhaps she's right," I said, placing my notepad and pen on the coffee table in front of me and folding my hands in my lap. "TV shows do make it seem like cheating is more prevalent than it really is."

What the hell was I talking about? If anything, TV doesn't do the real statistics justice. But of course, I couldn't admit that to
her.

"Don't be like that," the girl pleaded with me, narrowing her eyes. "I get enough of that at home. I came here because you help people, and I need help. Well, my mom does, anyway. I can't stand watching her live in this dreamworld. Someone has to show her who he really is. Someone has to wake her up."

"Some people don't want to be woken up," I stated simply, feeling the hypocrisy of my words bear down on top of my head. The truth was, I got into this business for one reason and one reason only: to wake people up. Because I had convinced myself that the truth is always better than the lie. No matter what people try to tell themselves.

The girl's eyes bored into me for a good five seconds before she reached down to the floor and unzipped the front pocket of her backpack. She pulled out a white letter-size envelope and smacked it down on the coffee table between us. "Here's your fee. In cash."

I stared quizzically at the envelope, trying to figure out if I even
wanted
to know how an almost thirteen-year-old girl could get her hands on that kind of money.

"Look," she continued, interrupting my thoughts. "If I'm wrong, then there's no harm done. You don't even have to tell my mother that I was here. But if I'm right and he does, you know, take the bait . . ." Her voice trailed off, and she paused dramatically before completing the sentence. "Then you just saved my mom from a lifetime of delusion." Then she leaned against the back of the couch and folded her arms contentedly across her chest, watching me as I continued to study the mysterious white envelope.

There was a long, heavy silence in the room as my brain battled out the decision that was literally lying on the table in front of me.

Finally, I picked up the envelope, feeling the burden of the heavy cash in my hands, and handed it back to her. "I'm sorry," I said gently. "But I just can't take this case. If you bring your mom in here, we can talk to her about her options and possibly convince her to hire us herself. But I just don't think it would be ethical for me to take money from you."

Lexi flashed me a dirty look that only a twelve-year-old girl with scratches on her face could possibly pull off. "Fine," she said as she rose and marched toward my office door, envelope of cash in hand. "But this isn't over. You
will
eventually change your mind. And next time, I'll come back with hard evidence."

I nodded politely but didn't respond.

"And by the way," she added, the anger in her voice suddenly replaced with the wisdom and peaceful poise of a spiritual shaman. "Anyone that you care about
deserves
to be woken up."

1. Describe the setting of your ideal wedding ceremony (i.e., beach, garden, desert spa, mountain lodge, house of worship, yacht, private home, backyard, golf course, etc.).

2. Describe your ideal wedding cake (shape, color, flavor, frosting, filling, tiers, designer or classic, decorations).
Please attach any photographs or magazine cutouts if applicable.

The next day, I was sitting in the pastel-colored waiting room of Willa Cruz, wedding planner extraordinaire. Jamie had gotten a rave referral from someone at his office who had recently gotten married and employed Willa. Apparently, you just "can't plan a successful wedding without her." And so there we were. Although personally, I thought it was a bit too early to be talking to wedding planners—I was still getting used to the engagement part—but according to Jamie's colleague, it's
never
too early to start talking to a wedding planner, which made me wonder if I should have booked this appointment back when I was sixteen.

I tapped the backside of my engagement ring against the plastic clipboard in my lap. The questionnaire attached to it read, "Questions for the Bride." Ten minutes had passed since I'd reluctantly accepted the daunting document, and the only question I had managed to answer was, "How long have you and your fiancé been engaged?" And the only reason
that
answer was fresh on my mind was that when I had read the question that preceded it, my first thought was: I've only been engaged for a little over a week, how am I supposed to know what kind of cake I want?

I was still reeling from yesterday's meeting with Lexi Garrett, the twelve-year-old Dalai Lama of relationships. She had caught me off guard, in more ways than one. And she had made such an unnervingly valid argument for me to test her father.

And the most unsettling part of all was that something was telling me she was right. That at twelve years old, this little girl had been able to see something in her parents' marriage that her mother had missed. Sometimes it takes an unbiased eye to notice the nuances of a relationship, but that was the most confusing part. Lexi wasn't an unbiased eye. She was their
daughter.
If anyone had anything to lose from the outcome of an assignment like this, it was her.

But the sheer synchronicity of it all was what was really haunting me. She was twelve years old.
Twelve.
The exact age I had been when I first found out about my dad's affairs. And I did nothing about it. Then magically, seventeen years later, into my office walks Lexi Garrett. And she wasn't about to let her dad get away with anything.

Was the universe sending me some kind of sign? Some kind of chance at redemption? Or was it just a really annoying coincidence?

I sighed and tried to push the idea from my mind. I had to focus on the task at hand. Which right now was this impossible wedding planning questionnaire. And thinking about twelve-year-olds who suspect their fathers of cheating on their mothers seemed highly inappropriate at this moment.

3. Describe your ideal wedding theme (i.e., Hawaiian luau, enchanted forest, fairy-tale fantasy, butterfly garden, winter wonderland).

If I had known there was going to be a test, I would have studied first. I glanced to my right and stole a quick peek at Jamie's clipboard. Under the heading "Questions for the Groom," I caught sight of:

1. What is your favorite color?

2. What is your favorite kind of music?

3. How many people are in your immediate family?

Okay, now
those
were questions I could answer. I glanced at my clipboard and searched for anything that resembled an inquiry about my favorite color. But I couldn't find one. I was being asked whether I wanted an enchanted forest or a fairy-tale fantasy, and Jamie got to decide if he likes pop/rock better than punk?

What kind of lopsided wedding questionnaire was this?

And what had I been doing all of my life when clearly I was supposed to be thinking about this kind of stuff? And apparently organizing a collection of magazine clippings of wedding cakes in my spare time.

Great, I thought. We've only been engaged a week and I already suck at it.

I reluctantly glanced down at question number four.

4. Describe your ideal wedding dress.

Underneath, I wrote the word
White
and moved on, content that I had finally gotten to one I could actually answer.

I glanced down the rest of the page. It went all the way to question ten: Then I flipped to the next page and the page after that and the page after that. I felt as if I were rifling through a legal brief. How far did this thing go?

I finally got my answer on page five when I read the final question:

47. Do you have any specific vineyards that you would like to special order your wine from?

This was officially the most brutal test I'd ever taken. It was worse than the SATs. Way worse. It was the WATs: the
Wedding
Aptitude Tests. And I could only imagine the little piece of paper I would get in the mail six to eight weeks later informing me that I was
not,
in fact, apt to have a wedding. Although I was starting to believe that I didn't exactly need to take a test to figure that out.

Jamie snapped his pen down against his plastic clipboard with a startling clank. "Done," he announced with pride. As if we had been racing.

Of course he was done. He had five preschool-level questions and I had forty-seven Ph.D. thesis-style essays.

"Good!" I forced out brightly. Then I flipped through the four remaining blank pages of my own novel/questionnaire and set down my pen in defeat. "Me too, I guess."

Jamie leaned over and attempted a glance at my top page. "How'd you do?"

I tilted it upward toward my chest, blocking the forty-five gaping blank spaces from his view. "Pretty well, I think."

"What'd you put for 'favorite type of food'?"

"Uh," I said, tapping my fingernails against the back of the clipboard. "I don't think I had that question."

I was afraid that Jamie would insist on looking at my answers, but fortunately, a door to our left swung open just then and Willa herself emerged, looking like Wedding Planner Barbie with her perfectly coiffed layers of wavy blond hair and dressed in a lavender-colored suit with matching lavender pumps.

"Jennifer! Jamie!" she proclaimed passionately, opening her arms to us as if she half expected to engage in some kind of group hug. But instead she rapidly curled back her manicured fingertips and beckoned us into her office. "Come in, come in! We have exciting things to discuss!" With this, she crinkled her nose slightly and flashed me a coy little wink as if we shared some intimate secret that Jamie was not privy to.

Jamie took my hand and we entered another pastel-colored room and sat on a pair of matching baby yellow armchairs. As I warily took in my surroundings, I felt as though I had just walked into an Easter basket.

"So," Willa said, sitting pretty in a twirling desk chair. "Let's talk about the big day. "Do you have a date in mind? Or a time of year, perhaps?"

Jamie looked at me, and I continued to stare straight ahead. Maybe it was too soon for wedding planners. I failed my questionnaire, and we hadn't even talked about a date yet.

"Well," Jamie began, "I was thinking maybe next summer would be good. Would that give us enough to time to plan everything?"

I stared at him in surprise.
Next summer?
We hadn't talked about that at all. Or did I just sleep through that conversation?

Clearly, he could feel my confusion and turned to me to ask, "What do you think, babe?"

But who was I to argue? I couldn't even decide if I wanted a butterfly garden or a winter wonderland. What good was I? "Um, yeah!" I said, trying to sound upbeat. "Summer sounds great."

Willa scribbled something in a lavender notebook, and I couldn't help but wonder if she had a corresponding book for every pastel-colored suit in her closet or if we were just fortunate enough to catch her on a particularly coordinated day. "I just
love
summer weddings," she gushed. "And where were you thinking of having this blessed event?"

Jamie looked at me again, and I just shrugged. "I don't think we've really talked about it yet," he offered sympathetically, and I felt relieved that I hadn't also apparently slept through our conversation about wedding locations.

"Oh, that's totally
fine
!" Willa elongated the word
fine
as if it were actually made up of three elaborate syllables as opposed to just the boring one. "We'll come up with the absolute best location for you two. Now, did you fill out your questionnaires?"

Jamie produced his and handed it to her with a glowing grin while I continued to cling to my clipboard, keeping it tight against my chest. "Uh, I'm not really done with mine yet. I have so many ideas, I just couldn't figure out how to organize them into this short little questionnaire." As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I knew I was doomed. I had no idea where they even came from. They just sort of snuck past my bullshit radar and sprang forth into the room, running around the office like rambunctious children who had been fed too much sugar. And now it was impossible to reel them back in.

"Great!" Willa exclaimed. "The more ideas the better. You just take your time and fax it over to me whenever you're done."

Thirty minutes later, after the lady in lavender had thoroughly explained to us the value of what she referred to as her "stress-free, all-encompassing Wedding Extravaganza Package," Jamie and I left Willa Cruz's office with a handful of brochures, a portfolio stuffed with sample wedding invitations that were guaranteed "to die for," and a second appointment scheduled for two weeks from today.

"So, I spoke with my Realtor yesterday," Jamie said as he sat in the driver's seat and fastened his seat belt.

"About what?" I asked, flipping through my iPhone and skimming all the new e-mails I had accumulated over the past hour. Hadley had scheduled three new client meetings for this week alone. Was it just me or were fidelity inspections becoming increasingly more popular?

"About putting my loft up for sale."

Suddenly, my new e-mails were no longer of any interest. "Why would you do that?"

"Well," Jamie began, placing his hand tenderly on my knee. "I mean, we're engaged now, and I practically live at your place anyway, so . . ."

"You want to move in with me?" I asked with sudden realization.

"Don't you want me to?" Jamie asked. But for some reason, it didn't sound like a question. It sounded more like an accusation.

"Uh," I stammered. "Yeah, I guess so." Although I really hadn't given the subject too much thought. But now that he mentioned it, I suppose it made sense. I mean, we
were
engaged. And engaged people were supposed to live under the same roof, weren't they? But then again, the only engaged people I knew besides Sophie were usually not engaged for much longer after I met them.

"I mean, we could sell
your
place, but I figured since mine was so much smaller, it would be easier to—"

"No, no," I quickly interrupted. "You're right. Living in my condo makes more sense."

"And then," he continued with an abrupt spike in enthusiasm, "I was thinking in a year or two, maybe we could spring for a house."

I could feel my head start to spin. How did we go from planning a wedding to buying a house in less than five minutes? Next he was going to tell me that I was pregnant.

When I didn't reply to the house comment, Jamie spoke again. "So I told my Realtor he could give some interested buyers a sneak peak while we were in Cabo this weekend."

I nodded somewhat absently. "Well, good. That sounds good."

"And after we get back, I'll start moving some of my stuff in."

"Great!" I managed. But it felt so forced and insincere, and I immediately wondered why.

Of course I wanted to move in with Jamie . . . eventually. I guess I just didn't think eventually would come this soon. But my mind
had
been pretty occupied lately with work matters. Planning Katie's long-term undercover at the Stantons', scheduling Shawna's upcoming double-booked night in Vegas this weekend, and now the desperate plea for help from a pre-adolescent girl. It was definitely a full-time job that required the majority of my time and energy. And that would most likely account for why I hadn't given any of this other stuff much thought in the past week. I supposed it was a good thing that Jamie had seemed to take the reins on everything else. The wedding planner, the wedding date, selling his loft to move in with me. I was glad that he was so on top of everything. Especially because based on my test scores, I was clearly much better at breaking up marriages than I was at planning them.