Page 1 of A Smile Full of Lies
Chapter
One
SEPTEMBER 15, PRESENT DAY
KNOX
The call cameat 10:03 a.m. Unknown number. I sent it to voicemail and a brief transcription flashed across my screen:
“Hey, Mr. Knox — it’s Josh Walker with Southern Scare Collective. Just wondering if you’d be open to discussing a potential Halloween event opportunity at Stonewood Manor…”
I stared at the screen. For three seconds, I didn’t breathe.
Stonewood Manor.
Just seeing the name sent a cold rush down my spine. My pulse throbbed in my throat, and something hot twisted behind my ribs.
That house wasn’t a venue. It wasn’t some abandoned Southern gothic backdrop for a fucking haunted hayride. It was where my mother bled out in the foyer, where my sister’s body was found on the second floor, face down on the hardwood she used to dance barefoot across when she thought no one was watching.
Ava. She was nineteen and so goddamn alive it hurt to be around her sometimes.
She’d come out to me six months before the murders, late one night when I caught her sneaking in through the side gate with smudged eyeliner and a black eye she swore was from cheer practice. But it wasn’t, and I fucking knew it. I stared her down until she admitted the truth.
Some asshole she’d been hooking up with — a guy a year or so older than her, who didn’t like finding her pressed up against a girl in the hall closet at a party — hit her when she told him he wasn’t owed anything because she was bisexual, and not his property.
He’d tried to slut shame her. She spat blood on his too-expensive tennis shoes and told him to go fuck himself.
By the time I found out, it was too late for me to beat his ass. I decided to send a more life-altering message instead. So I found the party’s security footage, hacked into the system, pulled the clip of him hitting my sister, and sent it to every college he’d applied to since taking a couple of gap years after he graduated from high school — including Stonewood University. He didn’t get in anywhere he wanted to go.
Ava never asked me to do it. She never thanked me either. But the next time I saw her, she smiled like she knew his ruin was my doing.
“Don’t tell Mom and Dad about me being bi,” she’d whispered that night. “Not yet. Just — let me be your problem for a while.”
I told her she was never a problem. Not to me. Not once.
But she died without ever telling our parents the truth. The murderer took away her chance to grow into living fully as her authentic self. I resented that loss every day of my life.
My hands clenched so hard the phone screen threatened to crack.
We were supposed to go on a family trip the weekend they died. We should have all been in Atlanta for the weekend, at some dumb pumpkin festival Ava had begged to go to.
I’d bowed out last minute because I was following a lead on the girl I was almost sure Thayer, my asshole best friend, was cheating on Rosalind Cooper with.
Ros was my obsession, even then. She had been since I was eighteen years old. From the first moment I saw her, seven years ago now, she burrowed under my skin. I couldn’t outrun the magnetic pull she had on me, no matter how hard I tried, despite the fact that she was dating Thayer when we officially met for the first time.
I’d gone to Gulf Shores that weekend instead of going with my family. That’s where I was when Dad called me on Saturday morning to say the whole trip was off anyway. Something urgent came up at the company he’d built from the ground up, Knox Cybersecurity Incorporated.
“We’ll reschedule,” he said.
We never did. That chance died with them.
If my father hadn’t been a workaholic, he and my mother and sister might still be alive.
If I hadn’t been obsessed with proving Thayer was a piece of shit who didn’t deserve Ros, I might have died with them. In a sick twist of fate, my obsession with Rosalind Cooper had saved my life, and subjected me to the most excruciating pain I’d ever experienced, all at once.
If we’d gone — if I’d just pushed harder to make the Atlanta trip happen — maybe my family would still be alive. And none of this — the blood, the press always circling me like bloodhounds, the endless fucking aftermath — would’ve happened.
But none of those what-if scenarios happened, and instead of a consolation Sunday brunch with my mom, my mother’s friends got silence and a no-show. They instantly knew something was wrong. My mother would never stand anyone up without calling to explain herself, much less her best friends.
