Page 166 of A Smile Full of Lies
I wanted to throw up.
There was no undoing it. No way to pull it back now. The police press release had just handed us the biggest publicity boost we could ever have asked for. The timer ticked past 9:00, and just like that, the announcement posted to my socials. The link went live, and the story wasn’t mine anymore.
It belonged to everyone.
To Knox. To his family. To the people who still visited the graves without knowing the whole truth.
My inbox started pinging immediately. Mentions, messages, press notifications. The dashboard on the publishing site began tallying real-time sales.
Six hundred copies sold in ten minutes. Twelve hundred by the twenty minute mark.
The comments were already rolling in, too — some kind, some cruel, all loud. But I couldn’t look at them. Not yet. Not when all I could hear was the echo of Knox’s voice in my head:
You let yourself get stabbed to protect me.
And I had.
I’d gone behind his back. Risked everything. Pressed until Thayer confessed — because I neededsomeoneto tell the truth. Because I neededhimto have justice. Because I’d read the cold case file, cover to cover, long ago. And the silence around it felt like suffocation.
They didn’t deserve to be forgotten.
His mother. His father. His nineteen-year-old little sister.
Three bodies. One house. A trip to Atlanta canceled at the last second for a fucking work meeting. And Knox, away in Gulf Shores, trying to prove Thayer was cheating on me. Alive because he was obsessed with me, and alone ever since.
We’d been friends and neighbors for three years when it happened. I hadn’t known his family all that well, not really. They tended to keep to Stonewood Manor on the other side of town, for the most part, but I’d always seen the warmth in his eyes when he talked about them. Then I had to see the frigid grief in his eyes when he stood over their graves, and I’d promised myself that one day, I’d find the truth, even if it killed me.
Now I had. And the truth was on sale.
I didn’t hear him at first, just the quiet scuff of bare feet on hardwood. Then the soft creak of a floorboard. Then I felt the shift in the air.
When I turned, he was standing in the doorway, shirtless, jaw tight, hair mussed, gaze locked on my laptop.
The announcement was still up.
The title blazed across the screen:What We Buried in Stonewood.
“I didn’t hear you get up,” he said, voice low and raspy.
I shook my head.
“Didn’t sleep much.”
He didn’t move closer. Just looked at me. Then the screen. Then back again.
“It released today?”
“Yeah. And so did the police press release about the case being solved and closed. That’s all over the front page of the Stonewood Times.”
He stepped into the kitchen, slow, deliberate. Reached for the half-empty glass of orange juice on the counter and took a sip. His eyes never left mine. He’d paled a little at my words about the police press release.
“How bad is it?”
I didn’t lie.
“It’s… all of it. Everything I could prove. The break-in. The missing timeline. The dead ends. The breakthrough when you showed me that fragment of security footage. Thayer’s confession, and… after.” I paused, swallowing. “I did my best to tell the truth and honor your family’s memory.”
He didn’t flinch.
