CHAPTER
1
I’VE BEEN KILLED and incarcerated, tortured and seduced, stalked and obsessed. I’ve been the murderer and the victim, the detective and the fugitive, the hero and the villain. I’ve died over and over again. In the swamps of Louisiana, on the streets of Chicago, in a small suburban town where nothing ever happens. I’ve been a housewife, a call girl, a forensic anthropologist, a secretary, an assassin, a nun. And whether I am angel or demon, innocent or damned, only one person is to blame: my sister, Ava Hallett.
Everyone in America has read my story in her books, seen her on the talk-show circuit, eaten popcorn while I weep and bleed on the silver screen. The only reason she doesn’t have a television series is her apparent inability to write a series. One stand-alone best seller after another, and I’m the common denominator.
Ava is older than I am, and she laid claim to writing as casually as calling dibs on riding shotgun. And she didn’t stop there. Every job, every hobby, every boyfriend or passion or goddamn private thought I’ve ever had, she’s jammed into a novel. She takes my life and murders it, over and over again.
I wish I were more zen, a person who could let this shit go. I should have joined the Peace Corps or backpacked through Thailand. Without her, maybe I would have been ordinary, the kind of girl who goes to college in her hometown and marries the boy next door.
Instead, I ditched everything—my life in Northern Virginia, my relationship with my dysfunctional family, and the girl I used to be. Because of Ava, I’m living over fifteen hundred miles away in the suburbs of Houston, under an assumed name.
Now I sit, anonymous, with two other moms—Bethany and Felicia—at the edge of a playground, pretending to watch all the kids going up and down the slides. And I feel as if my happily-ever-after days in Texas must be numbered. This happiness is too easy. There’s no way I can hold on to it.
The three of us watch our kids, parallel-playing in separate areas. In sync but apart. Bethany’s son is hanging by his knees from the climbing frame, Felicia’s son spins around and around with his arms flung wide, and my stepdaughter Emma is digging through the mulch with a stick.
Bethany sits next to me in the shade. She’s heavily pregnant, and sweat beads lightly under her bangs. Although she’s pushing forty, her blonde hair is up in a ponytail and she wears denim cutoffs like a teenager. She’s been talking at a brisk clip around the wad of gum in her mouth, words pouring out of her.
“Dan was in oil, so he spent years traveling overseas, working for the money. He banked every dollar he made. Then he had a layover in Atlanta, went to a Waffle House, and I was his waitress. I tell you what, his family was not thrilled that he’d found himself a divorced single mom with a teenager, a toddler, and a crazy ex, but now that we’ve got a boy of our own on the way, they’ve got nothing to say.” Bethany pats her stomach complacently.
I glance over at Felicia, and sure enough, she’s not even suppressing her smirk. The beautiful thing about Bethany is that she gives you all the gossip you’d ever want to know about her, right to your face. She’s not ashamed of anything.
Felicia and I, we like to know what’s going on with people, their stories. Felicia used to work behind the scenes in television, something about scripts and layout, which I always thought was just for magazines. She’s very visual, and I know she’s loving the picture Bethany makes as she tilts her head back and takes a swig from her Diet Pepsi.
You’d think someone with secrets like mine couldn’t be friends with someone like Felicia, wouldn’t you? But the key to covering up your past is to layer in a story that’s good enough to be a distraction. My personal smoke screen is the way I met my husband, Andrew, on FindMyMatch.com.
In a way, our story is the inverse of Bethany’s. He was the single parent, I was the self-sufficient stranger—although I wasn’t rich, and I was on the run. Not that Andrew knew that. For him, my smoke screen had to be that I was an only child, in mourning for my parents, who’d died together in a car crash. I almost backpedaled when I learned his wife had died in childbirth. But in the end I just added that guilt to the pile I’d already accumulated.
Andrew was calm, smart, and patient, and Emma seemed like the one thing I’d been waiting for my whole life. I fell hard for them both, but I didn’t kid myself that I deserved them. All I could hope was that starting over as a new person with a loving family would give me a chance to earn it for real.
When I told the story to Felicia, I spun a dozen tales of online dating nightmares. I could get laughs for the imaginary guy with the foot fetish, the one whose wife crashed our date, the one who referred to himself in the third person. “We are so lucky,” I told her. “We’ve got great guys. The world is full of crazies.”
Not like me. I’m only crazy on paper. Once I shed my name, I left all the madness behind. Maybe I am lying about my past, but I’m being honest here in the present. I love the feel of the sun on my face, my friends beside me, the happy shrieks of children. I’m not lying about anything that really matters.
“Lizzie!” Emma comes running over to me with something clenched in her hand. “Look what I found!”
I brace myself as she sticks her hand uncomfortably close to my face. This discovery could be anything from a beetle to a used eraser. She unfolds her chubby fingers to reveal a rhinestone pendant with the top loop broken off. The letter is L.
“It’s real diamonds, and L is for Lizzie.” Eagerly she presses it into my hand and takes off again, mulch flying under her feet. I curl my fingers over the trinket, wishing Lizzie had always been my real name or anywhere close to it.
“Sweet,” Felicia says, and I can see she’s glad she isn’t holding somebody else’s discarded junk. Her turn will come around again. I still remember when her son started collecting leaves—everything that came out of Felicia’s purse for weeks was powdered with dried brown leaf fragments.
“Want a piece of gum?” Bethany asks, adding another stick to the bulge in her cheek.
I shake my head as Felicia’s phone buzzes. She pulls it out, then looks up at us. “Getting together a carpool for book club. You going?”
Bethany shrugs. We all know she isn’t interested. Even at the pool, she never pulls so much as a magazine out of her bag. I have been a regular at the book club, even though I tell myself it’s a mistake every single month. And when this month’s book was nominated, I tried to trash it. I said I’d heard it was derivative and slow, with nothing to discuss. But it didn’t work. Ava’s books are always best sellers. Even a book club with a taste for literary fiction couldn’t overlook a thriller for women, about women, and by a woman. By everyone’s favorite author—everyone’s but mine.
“I can’t make it this month,” I lie.
Felicia won’t let it alone. “If Andrew’s out of town, just get a sitter. My neighbor’s daughter needs pocket money.”
“We’ll see.” I try to be noncommittal, but she shoots me a look that says I see right through you. Liar.
“Bring Emma over to my place. Tom won’t mind watching one extra.”
“I’ll let you know.”