Page 44 of Everyone Is Lying to You

From the living room, I wander into the kitchen. The space seamlessly blends modern convenience with rustic allure. Rough-hewn wooden cabinets line the walls, their rich grain glowing under the soft, ambient light filtering through large windows that frame sweeping views of the landscape.

It all looks and smells expensive up close, but somehow in the pictures and videos it looks simpler. It takes a lot of money to make life look this ruggedly homesteading chic and effortless.

A massive farmhouse sink sits beneath a window ledge adorned with fresh herbs growing in terra-cotta pots. The only sign of the absence of people is that the herbs are in need of watering. I turn on the tap and find a teacup to fill with water.

I glance uneasily at the gleaming freezer and think about the rumors that whoever killed Grayson sliced off a particular body part and put it in this appliance. The door is covered with more police tape. Looking closely, I can see the fingerprints marring its surface.

Despite the small signs of investigators milling around in here, it feels and looks like a soundstage. How many cleaners must Bex have in here on a regular basis to keep it looking like this with six children? My own house is consistently coated in sedimentary layers of dust, Legos, food, and sometimes even pee, since we happen to be potty training. Even when we had someone coming in to help us clean, the sanity lasted all of twenty minutes. Either Bex has the best-trained children in the world, or they never actually use this space. Something snags at the back of my mind as I thinkthat.What if they never truly use this space?I suddenly remember a sponsor booth set up at the MomBomb conference. The woman manning it had accosted me as I walked by.

“Want a flyer? We have a QR code for a free three-hour rental,” she’d shouted at me in an urgent tone.

Behind her was a massive banner with a photo of a pristine-looking kitchen and a well-coiffed woman baking brownies.

“Rental for what?” I’d asked politely.

“For your dream kitchen. We also offer dining rooms, kid rooms, and bathrooms for skincare and morning routine videos. Also nighttime routines. All the routines.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. “You’re renting rooms? By the hour?”

“We’re renting the dream,” she said again.Dreamseemed to be their company’s go-to noun.

“How much?” That seemed like the next-best question. How much did it cost to rent a dream?

“Oh, it varies. There are discounts if you need an entire day for a shoot and of course you can bring in your own photographers and videographers, but we also have a package where we can supply those for you. So all pricing is customized and you can sit down with one of our consultants right now if you like. We currently have properties in twenty-seven cities in fourteen states, but we are expanding every week. So many businesses are going remote that we are taking over old office space and creating the sets. Such a great idea, right?”

I still didn’t fully grasp what was happening until she offered to show me their promo video on her iPad. That’s when it hit me. They were renting houses and rooms for influencer backdrops.If you didn’t have the perfect kitchen or bathroom or child’s bedroom to take your pictures and videos in, then this company would supply them for you. It was like Airbnb for influencer stages, or like a seedy motel that rented by the hour, but instead of getting illicit sex you got to pretend your life was just slightly more beautiful than it was in reality.

I wondered what it must feel like. Not to step into the fantasy, but to step out of it, to leave it behind at the end of the day and return to your unfiltered reality.

“We of course make small changes for every guest, so nothing is exactly the same. And we can book you on a monthly rotation so that you can shoot all your content once a month and be done with it. Where do you live?”

I didn’t have words for what I was seeing. All those kitchens that I had coveted during hours of watching reels and stories on social media. No one owned them. Or someone did, but not the women in the videos. They were probably owned by some private equity firm based in the Cayman Islands, snatching up properties at auction and flipping them with new crown molding and posters that read,Grateful.

Bex of course has enough money that she doesn’t have to go the hourly rental route, but maybe she has the premium version. Maybe this is her soundstage. Maybe her real kitchen, her real dining room, her real TV room (if she has a TV, which she claims she never lets her children watch), are somewhere else.

I feel like Alice searching Wonderland for a hidden door. There is another key on this key chain. There’s somewhere else Bex wants me to look. I walk down the hallway away from the pristine sitting room. The first door opens easily. It’s a bathroom.The second is a closet with all the standard hall closet things in it, kids’ raincoats, umbrellas, shoes, hats. It’s slightly more disordered than the rest of the house that I’ve seen and that fact gives me hope. The door at the end of the hallway is locked.

As I turn the key in the lock I wonder, for about the tenth time, why Bex is leading me on this wild goose chase instead of just calling me and telling me her side of the story. Wouldn’t that be so much easier than all this subterfuge?

Maybe she knows me better than I think she does, knows my need to uncover things for myself, to report out a situation, to discover the proof rather than have it told to me.

I suddenly remember a conversation we had in college when I worked for the student newspaper. I was reporting out a story about the new restaurants opening up on the fringe of campus.

“Can’t you just google them?” Bex had asked, irritated that I was missing a date party with Phi Delt to visit two of them.

“I could. But that’s not the same. I want to talk to people in them. I want to meet the owners, taste the food, smell the smells. I need to see it all.”

The same thing is true now. I need to see her life for myself.

She also must know that I don’t trust her, not after all this time and all these years of silence. If she called right now and laid out her side of this story it would never be enough.

I open the door.

The hallway continues on the other side, practically a mirror image of what I’ve just seen except the sloppy and lived-in version of it. I almost giggle with joy. Here there are sneakers on the floor and greasy little handprints on the white walls. I step on a Lego and smile. Thank god. None of it is real. This is her real life.This is all of our real lives. Every mother’s life is coated in shit and Legos. It’s so goddamn validating.

It’s also proof that Rebecca’s whole brand is a lie. But is that the right way of saying it? Aren’t all celebrity brands manufactured? Bill Cosby pretended to be America’s perfect dad for a generation. Ellen DeGeneres cosplayed as America’s best friend. Apparently Dean Martin pretended to be a drunk even though he didn’t like to drink because it made male fans like him more. What celebrity out there is actually portraying themselves on any screen? If I’ve learned anything over the past few days at MomBomb it’s that these influencers are the next generation of celebrities and they’re all working from a script.

I keep walking. Family pictures adorn the walls, the frames crooked, probably from getting knocked by flailing arms, lacrosse sticks, and soccer balls. There’s another kitchen at the end of the hallway. It’s nice and the appliances are high end, shiny, and clearly new, but it’s normal-level cluttered, with actual things on the countertops like bottles of vitamins, a pill organizer, sandwich bags, water bottles. A tangle of device chargers is plugged into one of the outlets and a small notepad has a checklist of groceries that need to be ordered.

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