The Fall by John Lescroart

up?”
    “Five-thirty, quarter to six. It was still light out when we got to the restaurant.”
    “And you stayed how long?”
    “We were done by eight, I’m sure.”
    “And then what?”
    “Then we said good-bye.”
    “You didn’t drive her home?”
    “No.”
    “Was that unusual?”
    “A little bit. I thought I was going to—I usually dropped her off at home on date nights—but she wanted to stay out awhile.”
    “And do what?”
    “She said shop. We were in Chinatown, and one of the girls in the house was evidently having a birthday, and she thought she’d find a present down there.”
    “Did you offer to go with her?”
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Well, first, she didn’t ask. We’d just spent a couple of hours talking, and I was somewhat frustrated that she wasn’t telling me what was bothering her. She was getting snippy with me that I was pushing her a little. So the idea of us sitting in my car together for another half hour while I drove her home wasn’t exactly appealing to either of us, I think. In any event, I had lesson plans to prepare and hadn’t counted on making it a late night anyway.”
    “So what did you do then? After you decided you weren’t driving her home?”
    The question seemed to stump Greg for a moment. Finally, he shrugged. “Nothing. I mean, we said goodbye, gave each other a hug, and then I went and got my car and drove home.”
    Waverly waited for a beat, then sat back and crossed an ankle over his knee. “Did she give you any idea, while you were having this dinner, why she called you in the first place?”
    “Well, yes, but it wasn’t that. I mean, we settled that part early on.”
    “And what part was that?”
    Greg launched into a recounting of the foster extension-of-benefits program, from eighteen to twenty-one, that he’d argued for Max just that very afternoon. Anlya had been hoping to return to her mother’s home up until only a couple of months ago, hoping that Sharla had made strides in her battle with alcoholism.
    Greg explained that the state’s foster program liked to give formerly abusive or incompetent parents eighteen months to get rehabbed or otherwise straighten up their act, after which they could be reunited in their home with their children. Max was happy with Auntie Juney and didn’t want to go back to Sharla’s dysfunctional life, but Anlya had wanted to give her mother another try—she could move back in and the two of them could make it. Sharla would stay sober and Anlya would get a job or go to college, maybe both.
    But when CPS had arrived to do the evaluation on Sharla, they found that she’d fallen off the wagon in a bad way (if indeed she’d ever been on it), so Anlya’s dream of moving back in with her mother had been shattered. Psychologically, Greg said, this was probably bad enough, but “worse, now she’s turning eighteen in three months, and without an extension for her at her group home, she’s out on her own with no high school diploma, no job, no place to live—although then she’d be eighteen, and if she wanted to, she could go back to her mom. But that would have been a disaster from the get-go. Sharla’s not getting sober any time soon. So the clock was ticking, and it was a real mess.”
    “And she wanted you to argue her case in family court?”
    “Essentially, yes. I knew the basics because of Max. Her group home on McAllister is fairly well run, I gather. They could just extend her payments for another three years. At the very least, the extension would give her some time and a place to live. So I told her I’d get on it if they let me—for obvious reasons, they usually don’t want a male CASA like me with a female juvenile—or I’d try to hook her up with a female CASA who could get it done.” Greg realized that he’d been talking for a while. “In any event, that’s what she’d called me about originally, but we covered allthat in about the first fifteen minutes. After that, she just got