Page 4 of A Smile Full of Lies
He shut up.
“I don’t want your fucking haunted house. I don’t want your guests. I don’t want your money. I don’t want strangers playing pretend in the home where my mother, father, and nineteen-year-old sister all bled out on the goddamn floor. Do you hear me?”
“Yes,” he said, his voice small now. “Loud and clear.”
“Good,” I said, and ended the call.
I stared at the phone for a long time, listening to my pulse throbbing in my ears. He’d text me his number anyway. They always did.Just in case.
But there was no fucking case, no what-if, no scenario I could conceive of in which I handed over the keys tothathouse.
The walls still remembered. So did I.
No one would ever set foot in Stonewood Manor again — not while I was alive. Not for entertainment. Not for money. Not for anything.
That house wasn’t a haunted attraction.
It was a grave, and some things should stay buried.
Chapter
Two
OCTOBER 10, PRESENT DAY
ROS
My gut clenchedas I stared at the mess that was my inbox — unpaid bills, overdue notices, funeral expenses. I groaned.
“Exactly the kind of shit no twenty-four-year-old wants to deal with first thing in the morning,” I muttered to the too-empty house. “Especially not on your first day back to work after losing the woman who raised you.”
One subject line stood out among the wreckage: Exclusive Opportunity — Philip Knox.
It was an email from my agent, Nina Frost. She hadn’t exactly been blowing up my inbox lately. For years, I’d sent her manuscript after manuscript — thrillers, a romantic suspense, and a dark romance concept she barely skimmed before dismissing them all.
“Your voice just isn’t strong enough yet,” she told me once, like it was helpful. Like she wasn’t stomping all over the stories I wanted to tell.
So yeah. I wasn’t expecting a subject line that screamedbig break— and I definitely wasn’t expecting it to be tied to Knox.
Chewing the inside of my cheek, I opened it.
It was sharp, shameless, and exactly what I should’ve expected from her. After years of tearing down my fiction, Nina had finally found a story she believed in. Not one I made up, just the one she’d dug up about the man who’d lived next door to me since we were both eighteen years old.
Hey, kid. Quit fucking around with freelance copy gigs and leverage your connection with your mysterious millionaire neighbor already. People have been dying to get the exclusive inside story on his family’s murder ever since it happened four years ago, and you’ve got unparalleled access to this fucking guy. I have it on good authority that he has a key to your house, for fuck’s sake, and he’s been bringing you your mail and buying you groceries since your grandmother died. This story is a fucking true crime goldmine, and it could make us both rich as fuck. Just talk to the guy. Get him to open up to you. This is your ticket to the big time. Trust me.
- Nina
My heart hammered as I stared at the screen, bile rising in my throat. It might’ve been a golden opportunity — but the thought of betraying Knox like that made me sick to my stomach.
Nina probably thought she was doing me a favor, that she was finally handing me the kind of career-changing moment she’d spent years telling me I didn’t have in me. And the thing is, if you looked at it through her cold, calculated, morally-flexible lens? Maybe it was a favor.
After all, she’d shot down everything else I’d ever tried to do. She said my thrillers were too cerebral, that I got so tangled in the psychology that I forgot to actually tell a story. She called my romantic suspense too safe, too predictable, too cookie-cutter to stand out in a saturated market. My dark romance idea — the one I’d poured my fucking heart and soul into — was, in her words, ‘too niche to move units.’ She told me I didn’t have the voice, that I needed to write something commercial, that I wasn’t ready.
But now? Suddenly, she believed in me. Not because I’d grown or because I’d proven her wrong. No, she reached out because my neighbor’s life had imploded in a way she could monetize, and I was close enough to hold the wreckage in my hands.
She didn’t believe in my fiction. She just wanted me to bleed someone else’s truth out on the page for clicks and cash.
And the worst part — the part that made me want to slam my laptop shut and scream into a pillow — was that I could see how the idea made sense. It was clean. It was intimate. It was ripe with tragedy and trauma and true crime potential. It had everything the internet loved to chew up and spit back out. I could practically hear her voice now:This is what sells, kid. This is the shit people eat up.
