If You Tell a Lie

by Lucinda Berry

“Really, I’m a killer. That’s the first thing I did when I was born—killed my mom. Daddy keeps saying it’s not my fault, but that makes no sense when she literally died squeezing me out of her vagina. She bled out on the table.”

I laughed like it wasn’t a big deal, but I really wanted to know.

“I wiped the sink.”

This is only a test, Thera. And you’re good at tests. That’s what I told myself over and over again, because it had been true. I always got As.

Do you know how much work it takes to pretend like you’re fine every day? To be the sunshine when you’re really the darkness?

It was funny the way your mind played tricks on you. How you could tell yourself something enough times that eventually you believed yourself. Maybe that’s what made a good liar. You’re your biggest con.

She’d taken everything from me in the most brutal way possible, and she needed to pay. Literally pay.

I’d fallen under the spell of that summer all over again. Or was it the spell of Blakely?

you definitely don’t want it falling open beforehand. Can you imagine?”

We never asked how she’d gotten Phillip into pieces. How did she cut through his bones? That’s all I kept wondering.

Meg fed Phillip’s body to ghosts, and I fed him to alligators.

If she called again? Well, I hated to admit it, but the first question out of my mouth would be “What are we doing next?”

On our way to the Cayman Islands for our second honeymoon

That was all it took. Sometimes people just needed a little help unleashing what was already inside them. Something in her snapped. I watched it happen.