Page 142 of A Smile Full of Lies
I saw her at Heather’s today. She didn’t see me. Not yet. But I saw her smile at someone’s terrible poem, and I knew Knox wasn’t going to win this round.
Then there was an entry dated two days after that, and my mouth went dry as I read it.
She wasn’t even hard to charm. Smart girls rarely are. They’ve got this little-girl-like ache to be seen. To be chosen. All it takes is the right compliment at the righttime. A few stolen glances. A little mystery. She’s mine now, and soon enough, I’m going to rub Knox’s nose in the fact that I have the one thing he wants most in the world.
I flinched and scrolled faster. The next entry got worse.
Every time Rosalind Cooper looks at me, I think: you don’t even fucking know whose game you’re playing. You think I’m in love with you? You think I picked you because you’re my type? Fuck no. You’re leverage… a means to an end. That’s it.
Stupid girl, you were intended to be collateral damage in the war between me and Knox from day one.
My stomach twisted. I slammed the laptop shut, bolted to the back door, and pressed my forehead to the window, chest heaving.
Outside, the sun was dipping behind the trees, streaking the sky with gold accents on ash gray clouds. And something about the stillness — about the quiet — broke me open.
I slid to the floor and sobbed until I couldn’t breathe.
Grief. Rage. Betrayal. Guilt.
Because Ihatedhim. Because Igrievedhim. Because some part of me —some shameful, stupid, bleeding part of me— still wanted to believe he’d actually loved me once.
But he hadn’t. He never did. And the only person who ever truly had? He was the one who was livid with me because I nearly died trying to protect him.
When I could finally breathe again, I took my laptop to bed with me, opened the manuscript, and changed the title. The Stonewood Slaughter just didn’t hit right anymore, even though that’s what the media had called it for years.
I changed it toWhat We Buried in Stonewood.Because that’s what it felt like. A grave. A secret no one had wanted to exhume until now.
Knox’s voice echoed in my head.Write the truth.
And fuck, I was trying, but the truth wasn’t neat. It wasn’t tidy. It bled all over the page, soaking every line with the weight of grief and guilt and everything I never meant to feel for the man I used to love.
Not Knox. Thayer.
I hated him. I hated him for taking three years of my life and warping them into a fucking trophy. For using me. For touching me. For holding me in bed and laughing with me and looking me in the eyes and calling me baby… all because it pissed Knox off. Because it hurt him.
He didn’t love me. He wanted to win, and I was just a move on the board.
Alyssa’s photos of his journal pages sat in a folder on my desktop, each one timestamped and damning. Some entries were calm, methodical. Others dripped with jealousy and venom, like the words had festered before they ever hit the page.
Knox never fucking loses. That’s the problem. Everyone loves him. Everyone hands him things. So I took something. I took her. And he hates it. It feels so good watching him squirm.
Another, dated just weeks before the murders:
They deserve it. All of them. Living like fucking kings while I claw for every inch. Maybe I won’t stop at the safe. Maybe I’ll burn Stonewood Manor to the ground after we steal the tech in Henry Knox’s safe and sell it to the highest bidder, just for good measure. Wouldn’t it be fucking great to see that whole family come home from a trip to Atlanta only to find a burned-out husk where their big, gaudy-ass mansion used to be? I’d probably enjoy it more if they were all inside it when I lit it on fire. All except Knox… I’d rather watch him suffer through life without his family to back him up. But sometimes we don’t get everything we want. That’s life. I’ll just have to settle for stealing Henry’s tech and living like a fucking king after I auction it off to the highest bidder.
I clenched my jaw reading it. He knew what he was doing when he went into that house and found them at home, rather than vacationing in Atlanta.
Hechoseit.
Maybe it started as a robbery. Maybe he thought he was just going to scare them. But it turned into murder. It turned intobutchery.And the blood on his hands didn’t just belong to Knox’s family.
It was my blood, too. Because he would’ve stabbed meagain,he would have kept going, and he wouldn’t have stopped until the life left my eyes if Alyssa hadn’t busted in and pulled the trigger when she did.
I hated him. I hated what he did to Knox. What he did to me. What he did to Ava, and Henry, and Victoria.
But I couldn’t hate Thayer’s mother. That’s the fucked up part.
She’d lost her son. And no matter how monstrous he became, some part of Mrs. Williams would always remember him as her baby. She’d carried him for nine months, loved him from the moment she found out she was pregnant with him. She’d remember the little boy version of him. The one she kissed goodnight. The one who called her Mommy until one day it became Mom. She’d spent twenty-five years raising him and loving him more than she loved anything else on this earth.
