Page 79 of Everyone Is Lying to You

I wonder if Olivia will still be around when they make those choices. If she’ll be their managers too. I gaze over at her as she holds both the toddler’s chubby hands over his head, helping him walk as Stacy films the two of them in the distance.

Ever the puppet master. Always pulling the strings.

Epilogue

Veronica

I’d been told I was nothing and that I didn’t matter for so long that now I can easily be anyone and anything.

Everyone is lying to you. Never forget it. But here’s the truth: Grayson Sommers would still be alive if it weren’t for me.

I knew Marsden was meeting Gray that night when he went to his barn, and I knew exactly why. My brain works like a computer playing three-dimensional chess. It’s such a shame I wasn’t allowed to keep going with school, but to be honest, who needs college these days? You can learn everything you need to know about everything on YouTube, especially when you’re a teenage girl sitting at home alone, barely homeschooled by your exhausted and beaten-down mother. I had so much time on my hands and the world at my fingertips.

Working outside the home was never going to be an option for me growing up. Not only was it not an option, but it was strictly forbidden for the women in my family. I was trained toserve the men around me and told that in order to be holy and to belong to God I had to follow the rules and not question anything. If I disobeyed, I would burn in hell and be cast out of my family. I believed it. Took it all to heart, let it settle into my bones as fact. But once I became a teenager something didn’t sit right. I wanted more. So much more, and all the lies I’d been told about how small and insignificant I was made me that much more desperate to break free.

But it’s harder than you think to just leave. I was a child with no money or power of my own. Despite the fact that my family owns one of the fanciest hotels in the state, despite the fact that they were rich as hell, I’d never been allowed on a plane. They kept my world as small as possible.

When my dad forced me to marry Marsden, I didn’t think it would get any better, but I knew my husband would be easier to manipulate than my father. My father was dying to give his hotel to Marsden one day because he couldn’t imagine having to give it to one of his daughters.

If I couldn’t work outside the home, I would make the best of it. I’d be the best damn mother I could be. I became the CEO of our household and ran it like a business. I did it because I loved the control and also because I didn’t want my boys to grow up like Marsden and Gray, as entitled little shits who believe they’re masters of the universe. I wanted them to see who was boss even if it had to be in my house. They saw me in charge of things and they respect the hell out of me.

I’ve been reading Marsden’s emails and texts for years because I knew exactly what kind of beast he was when my father forced me to marry him. Spyware is a shockingly simple thing towork with. Invasive apps masquerade as legitimate ones and then use a phone’s or computer’s permission settings to spy on its user. It’s almost too easy.

So I knew about Marsden’s affairs and his gambling debts. I saw Rebecca’s message the night Marsden was heading to the barn with Grayson, the contract she’d drawn up asking him to give up all rights to her children. It was horrific to read, but I can’t say I was surprised. I’d had my own suspicions about Dr. Carmichael and listened to way too many of his lectures about the genetic dominance of the male sperm within our religious community.

Then Rebecca went a step too far. She forwarded Marsden all of Grayson’s disgusting emails to me. I had no idea why Rebecca had to involve me in her little scheme to get Marsden to give up the rights to her kids, and I didn’t like it one bit.

I barely had any time to react. I had just gotten home from being at the conference so I could get a decent night’s sleep in my own bed when Marsden came barreling into our bedroom and confronted me about the emails, drunk as a skunk. I was able to talk him down and convince him that I never once responded to one of those filthy emails. He believed me.

“Please don’t go see him tonight,” I begged. But I knew he would do the exact opposite. I knew he would go in there guns blazing and that I needed to control the situation as best I could.

It was always like that between him and Gray, the intense love that quickly gave way to rage and jealousy.

It’s true what I told the detective when he interviewed me. Marsden and Gray were always competing for things when we were growing up, including who could kiss a particular girl first,who could take whatever they wanted from her first. It was unfortunately me they both wanted, even though I was a child. They grabbed me on the church playground one day when I was twelve and they were nearly eighteen. They yanked me inside the shed where we kept the balls and playground equipment. It had been Gray who clapped his left hand against my mouth and shoved the other down my pants, putting his fingers so deep inside me I began to bleed. Then Mars lunged toward me. His lips were the first to ever touch mine. Grayson was so pissed he punched Marsden in the gut. They battled it out while I crawled out of the shed on bloodied knees. I confided in my mother that night, hoping she’d help me get some retribution. I told her about the kiss but was too ashamed to mention how Grayson violated me. She immediately told my father, and he insisted that since Marsden was the first to defile me that he would be the man I married. Daddy practically arranged it right then. I hated that man until the moment he took his last breath beneath the pillow I pushed over his face.

So I drove Marsden’s blacked-out ass to Grayson Sommers’s barn and let him loose. I didn’t think he’d actually kill Grayson, but I wouldn’t stop him from giving him the beating he deserved.

I waited outside and listened to them brawl, enjoying Gray’s cries for help. Then a crack of bone hitting bone and a loud rupture of metal on metal. When I walked in Marsden was sobbing over Gray’s broken body, cradling him in his arms.

“We have to call an ambulance,” he said, nearly waking up from his catatonic furor.

“Absolutely not, Mars. Get yourself together,” I snapped. He blubbered like a bitch boy. “You need to finish what you started.”

“I can’t,” he wailed.

“Then I will.”

“There’s a camera up there. I think I broke it.”

“Then go get it down,” I ordered him as I examined Grayson’s limp body. He was breathing, but barely. He needed to be put out of his misery and I had to pivot, just like Olivia always told me to do. Grayson was lighter than I expected (he was two inches shorter than Rebecca, like most of the Internet had suspected), but I was also in excellent shape from years of CrossFit and weight lifting. I could easily bench 180. I picked him up and before Marsden could scurry down from the hayloft with the camera I’d impaled Grayson on the blades of the harvester.

I’m not going to lie to you. Watching the life drain out of him sent a jolt of electricity through my body and then calmed me in a way that nothing else ever had. The head of an ax gleamed in the corner; it called to me. As Marsden stared at me in disbelief, I grabbed it and sliced clean through Grayson’s right wrist, severing the hand that defiled me all those years ago. I left it inside the freezer next to the sourdough.

“Everyone will blame Rebecca,” I assured my husband as I got him into his truck. “No one will ever know we were here.”

Marsden was a disaster. He barely remembered anything when we got home.

“Did I do it?” he’d asked pathetically.

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