“I just don’t want any loose ends if we’re gonna do this.” I let out a breath, a thousand thoughts running through my head at once. “Has to be done right.”

“Then you need to keep her away from the old man.”

I pause for a minute. “You really think she’s after his money?”

Mei takes a beat, pulling her leg straight up in an extreme stretch that makes me wince, her knee near her ear, then says, “I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. I don’t trust her.”

I don’t trust her, either.

As much as I try, I can’t figure this girl out. Why was she snooping on us in the first place? What did she want?

I pull out my phone and tap on the Instagram icon with my thumb.

“What are you doing?” Mei asks, reconfiguring her body into another stretch that makes my hip flexors scream.

“Hold on a sec,” I say.

I open a browser and Mei hovers over me the best she can with that stupid rigid skirt as I search Brandi’s name on Instagram. A ton of faces come up, but there are over five hundred results, even with the “i” at the end instead of a “y.” Every time I think I’ve found her, it’s some other Brandi with a poorly lit selfie as her avatar.

“Just go to Nate’s IG. He’s tagged her, for sure.”

I smile. “Do those stretches make your IQ stretch too?”

Mei laughs, and I pull up Nate’s page. I scroll down until I land on the first snap of them together, a selfie of them at Six Flags last year. Six Flags. How pure. I tap on the square. He’s tagged her.

I click through to her page and it’s public, but of course she hasn’t posted in over a year. I groan. “Shit. She doesn’t even post.”

I go back to Nate’s page and scroll through what are mostly sports pics. There are more cutesy snaps of him and Brandi together, but nothing interesting. Nothing telling.

“I’ll try Google,” I say to Mei, who’s getting impatient, but clearly fighting it.

I search Brandi’s full name and location, and it only takes scrolling through the first three pages of results for my eyes to settle on a small shimmering piece of gold. “Oh, my God.”

“What you got?” Mei asks, leaning over my shoulder.

I tilt my phone so she can see the photo I found on Google Images of an older white woman hugging Brandi. The woman posted it three years ago and tagged Brandi. I click through to her profile and scroll down.

“Look at where she works,” I say, then read from the screen. “Ascend Home for Troubled Teens.”

“Troubled teens? The fuck?”