Page 170 of A Smile Full of Lies
#5 overall in Kindle ebooks.
On track to hit the New York Times bestseller list, just one day after launch.
She looked up as I crossed the room, her voice barely a whisper.
“It’s happening.”
She turned the screen toward me.
A flood of tagged posts. Quotes from the book. Photos of people clutching their Kindles with captions likethis destroyed meandI’ll never forget the Knox name again.
I read the top line of a review from The Atlantic:
This book will haunt you. It demands that you remember the dead — and it refuses to let you forget the ones who failed them.
Ros swallowed hard.
“This is what you wanted, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, dropping to my knees beside her. “Exactly this.”
Still, I could see the panic hiding in her pulse. The weight of it. The fear that somehow she’d gone too far. That this would come back to hurt someone.
Me.
She reached for another tab. The sales tracker. The inbox. A spreadsheet of media requests. But I closed the laptop before she could drown in it again.
“You did everything right,” I said. “You told the truth. You gave them back their names.”
Her mouth trembled.
“I still feel like I betrayed someone.”
I cupped her cheek.
“You didn’t betray anyone, baby. Especially notme.”
She nodded once, but I could tell it was still sitting heavy on her chest.
Then the knocking came out of nowhere. Three sharp bangs. Too loud. Too fast.
Ros flinched like she’d been struck.
I stood, already cold inside.
I knew the tone of that knock, and I had a pretty good guess at who was probably fuming on our front porch.
The second burst of knocks came before I reached the door.
I opened it to find Nina Frost seething and practically foaming at the mouth.
Glossy lips. Designer sunglasses shoved into her hair. Tan trench coat that looked like it belonged on a Vogue cover, not at the front door of a man who’d buried his entire family on the same day, and convinced his next-door neighbor to resurrect their legacy by writing their story.
“What thefuck, Rosalind?” she snapped, pushing past me without a shred of shame, heading straight for Ros, storming into the living room like she owned the goddamn place. “You think you can cut me out, write the book I told you to write, and not evenwarnme that it was launching? You stabbed me in the back, self-published it, and you’re keeping all the profits for yourself. I’d be impressed if I wasn’t so goddamn pissed.”
My jaw ticked.
“You shouldn’t be here.”
