If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood

by Gregg Olsen

The eldest, Nikki, lives in the moneyed suburbs of Seattle, in a million-dollar home of gleaming wood and high-end furnishings. She’s in her early forties, married, with a houseful of beautiful children. A quick tour through a gallery of family photos in the living room touches on the good life she and her husband have made for themselves, with a successful business and a moral compass that has always kept them pointed in the right direction.

The middle daughter, Sami, eventually returned to live in her hometown, the same small coastal Washington town where everything happened. She’s just turned forty and teaches at a local elementary school. She has corkscrew hair and an infectious sense of humor. Humor is her armor. It always has been. Like her older sister, Sami’s own children are what any mother dreams for their little ones. Smart. Adventurous. Loved.

She jumps right in, letting the icy water stab at her body. Like Nikki, Sami is tied to things in the past. Things she can’t shake.

The youngest, like her older sisters, is a beauty. Tori is barely in her thirties: blonde, irreverent, and brilliant. Her home is farther away, in Central Oregon, but she’s very connected to her sisters. Adversity and courage have forged a strong, impenetrable bond between them. This young woman has made an amazing life for herself developing social media for a major player in the hospitality industry. Her posts for work and for her personal life never fail to bring a smile or even a laugh out loud.

She did it on her own, of course, but says she couldn’t have managed i...

Enduring their mother was what bound them together. And while they might have had three different dads, they were always 100 percent sisters. Never half sisters. Their sisterhood was the one thing the Knotek girls could depend upon, and really, the only thing their mother couldn’t take away.

It was what propelled them to survive.