Page 55 of Everyone Is Lying to You

I even had an epidural, which Gray thought was unnecessary, but I’d insisted after being in labor for forty-seven excruciating hours. I’ll always remember that gauzy, hazy tingle in my lower half, the way I was completely present for Alice’s birth, but not in agony. I’ll always remember it because it never happened again.

Gray told me I was weak for not doing it the natural way.As weak as you are when you can’t fall asleep without an Ambien?I wanted to snap, but I didn’t.

“Drugs don’t agree with you. Remember how hard it was for you to wean off them back in San Francisco?” Gray had said. It was the only time he ever mentioned the incident from back then. And it felt like a warning of sorts.

Our ranch was quite far from the hospital, and when Willow came along, Gray insisted we could manage just as well at home with the same midwife who had delivered him and maybe some help from Dr. Carmichael if we needed it. Who was I to disagree? I had been blessed again, or so I believed. Our lives were filled with abundance.

Gray filmed the birth on my phone. I don’t even remember him doing it. I didn’t ask him to. I don’t remember anything. I became a wild animal in those moments as Willow began to rip her way through my unmedicated body. I howled like a beast and scratched at the wooden floor so hard that I will always be able to see the marks. I barely made it into the water where I had planned to give birth.

“It’s normal,” the midwife assured me. This was the pain of the sacrificial mother, the pain all women must go through in order to be purified for motherhood. But I had already been “purified.” I had Alice. I had been a mother for two years.

In the midst of it all Gray filmed me as I screamed in horror. Then out came the baby. Everything went black. I didn’t find the video until much, much later. We took so many pictures of Willow, and of Alice holding her, that the video of the birth was buried deep in my photo stream. I only discovered it when I was pregnant again. I was looking for the last picture I’d taken when Willow was still in my belly. I wanted to show it to her to prepare her for the new baby.

By that point I had been blogging regularly about our life on the ranch. I didn’t think I would love it as much as I did. And for all Gray’s swagger about how he wanted to get back to the land and get his hands dirty he never seemed entirely comfortable with thehard work of farm life. He liked it when things went right, but 90 percent of things go wrong on a farm. And that’s if you’re lucky. I was always stepping in to find solutions to our problems. When the bison broke out of the paddock I found us steel fencing. When all of the chickens caught a virus and stopped laying, I figured out how to get them inoculated. You would hardly know that Gray grew up on the ranch. The more time we spent there the more he seemed like a bumbling city boy. But I didn’t write about that. I would never. I blogged about the beauty of it all. I wrote about mothering the babies, about my devotion to our church and our community. Though I remained skeptical of God, I did believe that it was the power of prayer that ultimately delivered my children to me.

I watched the video of me screaming in pain and thought,Wow, other mothers should see this.Until I had babies, I hadn’t seen a woman give birth.

I edited the video slightly. I didn’t include the worst of it—no one needed to see that—and I added some soothing music. I simply put a shine on it. It would be easier to digest that way. I also wanted to pretend that the next birth would be simple and beautiful because Gray again forbade me from going to the hospital. He told me I would be a failure as a mother if I couldn’t make it through childbirth without drugs. He said so many things to me, and I began to believe them. I convinced myself I was doing a service by sharing the video, but I also wanted that same thrill I always got when I showed off my work of mothering. I wanted people to tell me I was strong. That I was capable. I wanted the assurance that I could do this again.

I hitPost.

It had millions of views within days. And most of thecommenters seemed to love what I was doing. They wrote that they longed for a life like mine, that living on a ranch was their fantasy while they toiled away at their desks from nine to five. When the next babies came the attention only amplified. My audience loved babies. They loved me. I wasn’t lonely anymore. I had all these new friends.

That feeling didn’t last, but it was a high for a long time. I started baking again. It had always been my salvation, but now it was more than that. It was almost an addiction. Éclairs, croissants, peasant bread. I made Oreos from scratch one day and then ketchup the next. The attention was addicting, but it was also lucrative. Sponsors reached out to me by sliding into my DMs. They wanted to know if I would wear their dresses, use their frying pans, try their natural nipple balms. I said yes, yes, and yes. Gray didn’t need to know. By then he was on the road so much. He had a couple of start-ups going, had invested in real estate in the dodgy part of the city, and was already considering a run for office. The ranch bled money. My husband was by no means a real cowboy. He could ride a horse, but he passed out the first time he had to castrate a bull calf. And having a staff was expensive. By the time Gray realized what I was doing he was grateful for the infusion of cash. He even agreed to be in some of my posts and reels, but only if he got approval of them first. He was so vain.

He did like doing workout videos together because he had invested in a bunch of fitness and creatine supplements. He was fine doing anything he considered “manly.”

That’s when Olivia showed up on my doorstep. Out of the blue.

She grinned like a wolf when I opened the door. “I’m gonna change your life.”

Chapter Sixteen

Lizzie

“Come to a secret dinner,” she whispers in my ear.

I turn my head to look behind me, but the woman is standing directly in the sun, and I can’t make out who she is at first. My eyes stare at the perfectly tanned and toned legs that seem to go on and on and then the modest but stylish one-piece bathing suit in blue gingham. Finally, the halo of blue-black hair rippling in the wind comes into focus.

Veronica Smith in the flesh.

She’s here.

The article I wrote forModern Womanabout Bex and what she’s been through got the most traffic of anything we’ve published in two years. There’s no way Alana is letting me out of here. And after what I’ve seen and my talk with Olivia, I’m committed. I’m in.

This time I wrote the truth as best I could. Occasionally my own emotions got the best of me, and I had to rein them in. Wepublished both of the photographs, the old and the new. Obviously, we couldn’t say that it was Grayson who hurt Bex. I have no proof, but I also have no doubt.

The Internet is deeply divided over the photos. There’s currently aSave Barefoot Mamacampaign running, complete with memes and GIFs. No one is clear on what exactly Bex can still be saved from. The damage has been done. Grayson Sommers is dead. The same “citizen journalists” who castigated her only twenty-four hours earlier are now desperate to get to the bottom of the abuse. They’re trying Gray Sommers in absentia, combing through a decade of visuals on Bex’s accounts looking for more evidence. They claim they see a bruise here, a scratch there. One believes they have cracked a secret code within her captions where Bex was consistently crying out for help.

There’s a second camp too, one filled with defenders of Grayson. They claim the images are doctored; that Bex is a delusional narcissist, desperate for attention; that she probably hurt herself just to make Grayson look bad.

The cops called me this morning. They want to talk and now I think I need a lawyer so I told them I’d be there tomorrow morning with ourModern Womanattorney on conference call. I may also ask Olivia to join me. I touched base with Peter to check on the kids and was reassured but also slightly put out that everyone seemed to be faring so well without me.

For the next couple of hours, I’m letting myself soak in the good life. It would be a travesty for a lovely pool to go to waste, even given the circumstances. Yes, everything that’s happened in the past five days has been horrific. But frankly it’s also the first vacation I’ve been on without kids in years and even with all thedrama it’s still easier than keeping my kids from pooping in the pool before drowning.

I braved the precarious swinging rope bridge this morning with my laptop in tow and I’ve been working from a chaise on the mesa for a few hours. I could get used to this, though I miss Peter and the kids. I haven’t sat alone by a pool since our honeymoon. As soon as I got myself settled, a waiter brought me a complimentary papaya smoothie. Just because. A cool towel scented with eucalyptus was draped on the back of my neck. Every so often someone appeared to ask what I needed, what would make me more comfortable, how could I feel more zen. After years of ignoring my own needs, being cared for feels like the ultimate gift.

I’m typing away with my earbuds in, munching on lightly buttered zucchini flowers, when I hear the sultry whisper. For the past twenty-four hours I’ve pored over all of Smith’s media channels.

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