Page 28 of Everyone Is Lying to You

The photo must have been taken quickly and secretly with a phone. Only the torso was visible and it was slightly blurry. In it, Grayson’s plaid shirt was ripped in two. His bare chest was splayed out over the sharp blades of some kind of farm equipment. They had ripped through his entire abdomen, flaying the skin open. The floor of what I assumed was the Sommerses’ barn was coated in dark blood, so dark it almost looked black.

I choked back a gag.

“Ohmygod…ewwwwwww,” the henfluencer squealed.

“What?” everyone around her demanded in unison.

“Someone apparently sliced off one of Grayson’s body parts and put it in the kitchen freezer.”

“Which one?” I asked.

“Not sure yet. But I bet he got the Lorena Bobbitt treatment.”

“Do you think Rebecca did this?” another tablemate had asked me hungrily. “You’re friends with her. Weren’t you with her last night? It looked like you were with her last night in her photos.” This last line came out like an accusation. She moved her chair slightly away from me.

“No. Absolutely not. She didn’t do this. And I don’t know anything.” I stood up, desperate for air. Desperate to leave. I wanted nothing to do with any of it. I wanted to erase those terrible images from my mind.It isn’t real,I told myself.

“I was with her l-last night,” I stuttered when someone else repeated her question.

“Why didn’t y’all come to the welcome circle?” another voice asked accusingly.

“I was tired.”

“Were you with her all night?”

“Well, right until bedtime.”

“So she could have done it.”

Everyone close to us was listening. I dropped my voice to a whisper. “But she didn’t. She wouldn’t.”

“How well do you know her?”

I didn’t know how to answer that question. Because at one point I would have said I knew Bex better than anyone. But that was too long ago. Suddenly my phone rang with a number I didn’t recognize.

I sent it to voicemail and seconds later it rang again. I didn’twant to answer it. I wanted to call my husband. I wanted to call Bex. I wanted to get the hell out of there.

But when it rang a third time I walked to the back of the room and answered.

Sure enough, it was the police. They knew I’d been with Bex the night before. “How?” I’d asked dumbly.

“She tagged you on Instagram.”

Ace detective work. They asked if I wanted someone in the ballroom to come find me and get me to the police station. I managed a quietno. “I can drive.”

The officer on the line gave me the address of the station and I silently thanked God that they hadn’t tried to march me out the way they did Olivia Jackson.

That’s how I ended up here, being questioned for more than an hour. Now I just wait. When the detective was questioning me, he told me I shouldn’t leave just yet and I didn’t know if he meant the police station or the state.

I’m greedy for information as I sit beneath these fluorescent lights, constantly checking my impotent phone to see if service has somehow miraculously returned.

“Elizabeth Matthews.”

I jump at the sound of my own name. It’s Detective Walsh again. “We have a few more questions.”

“Have you ever met Rebecca Sommers’s children?” he asks when I sit back down in the little room. I shake my head. Though I can name them in age order, and I’ve seen two of them born on the floor of Rebecca’s house on her Instagram reels. Though I feel like I know each and every one of them intimately, which I am only just starting to realize is slightly gross and unsettling,I don’t actually know them. I’ve never met a single one of them in real life, never touched their bouncy cheeks or smelled their downy heads. I don’t know those children at all.

“I don’t. Where are her kids now?”

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