Page 54 of Everyone Is Lying to You

One of the Smith triplets? Is Veronica Smith a client?

“Who do you think killed Gray?” I flat out ask her as she signs the bill, leaving a 50 percent tip.

“Not Rebecca,” she says with intense certainty. “And that’s all that matters.”

“Is it?”

“Yes, it is.” She stands. “Goodbye, Lizzie. I’ll see you soon.”

Before she can reach the exit she pivots on her heel and doubles back. “Can I have another Twizzler?”

“Um, sure.”

“Also one more question: What do you want?”

“What do you mean?”

“When this is all over what do you want?” I continue to stare at her dumbly. No one ever asks me what I want anymore.

“I want Rebecca and her kids to be safe. I want to know that she didn’t do it. I want justice.”

“Right. Of course. All those things. But what do you want for you?”

It’s such an odd and seemingly inappropriate question given the circumstances.

“I want to write again, to report out real stories again.” It erupts out of my mouth like it was waiting in there this entire time. “But it feels impossible.”

Olivia gives a satisfied nod. “Elizabeth, I’m a gay Black woman living in God’s chosen countryside. We make our own success. Nothing is impossible. You can do anything you put your mind to.”

She’s deadly serious. “Okay. Good to know your dreams. I like knowing people’s dreams.” With that she strolls out the door, Twizzler dangling from between her fingers.

Who the hell is this woman and what kind of a game is she playing with all of us?

Rebecca Sommers’s Picture-Perfect Life Was Far from Perfect

By Elizabeth Matthews

Like many of you, I’ve been watching Rebecca Sommers’s Instagram and YouTube channels with a sort of morbid curiosity over the years. She was beautiful. Her family was beautiful. It all seemed so perfect. But nothing is perfect. No marriage, no parent-child relationship, no friendship. I was friends with Rebecca a long time ago, back in college. I called her Bex then. We all did.

Bex was a force of nature. So smart, so driven. Insanely ambitious but always up for a good time. When we lost touch almost fifteen years ago, I was devastated, and reconnecting recently meant a lot to me. But in reconnecting I learned something about Rebecca’s seemingly picture-perfect marriage to Grayson Sommers that I am only sharing now because I think we all need to understand that what we saw on our screens was not Rebecca’s reality…

Chapter Fifteen

Rebecca

When you have kids you’re never truly alone, but it’s still possible to be painfully lonely.

Once I became a mother my loneliest moments came in the middle of the night, after I’d gotten a colicky baby to bed, after I’d rocked them for hours and hours, bounced up and down on my toes until my calves burned because the babies liked the vertical sensation better than the side to side.

I’d crawl back into my bed, next to a sweaty toddler who refused to sleep alone, and stare up at the ceiling fan as Gray snored blissfully next to me. Even though he didn’t drink he took prescription pills to sleep. Not that I think he would have gotten up with the babies anyway.

“I’m terrible with them,” he said any time he tried to do anything. Pure weaponized incompetence.

Sleep always eluded me, and I felt more alone than I ever had in my entire life.

Back then our church leaders encouraged us new mothers to keep journals and even start blogs where we wrote about our life with our children. “Show the world your joy. Connect with other women going through what you are bearing,” the pastor said. It was easy to start pretty soon after I had my first, Alice. Took about five minutes in the dead of night to create a blog on WordPress and the confessional nature of it was addicting at first. I kept going when the others came along. I couldn’t tell the truth exactly, but I could write a version of it that made what I was doing as a mother feel right and good. Iwasserving out my purpose. I could complain about the colic, but I could also post pictures of my gorgeous babies, and other women would comment and tell me I was doing a good job, that the kids were perfect, that I was perfect. It was the validation I didn’t know I needed.

My first truly viral post was about natural birth. I delivered Alice in the hospital, which made sense given everything we had been through to get pregnant with her. I wasn’t taking any chances.

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