None of This Is True

by Lisa Jewell

Her breath has caught slightly; she feels almost winded. Death is a clean break. She glances across the room at Walter, to see if he’s noticed, but he is oblivious.

After half an hour she feels him leave the bed. She hears his feet soft against the carpet. Then the creak of the floorboards in the hallway. Then he is gone, and she stretches out across the empty bed, knowing that it is hers for the rest of the night.

Affair?

She unzips her denim makeup

Damn she really is obsessed with denim

Worked fine for my other two.”

How old is he

“There’s power in being a teenager. I miss that power in some ways. I would like it back.”

Its giving maddy from euphoria

Josie tucks the hand wash into the back of her underwear drawer with the Nespresso pod. It came in such a pretty bottle: dark gray with a cherry-blossom print on it, like Japanese art. And it smells like Alix.

This suggestion of what Alix had been doing in the hours before they first met seems strangely magical, weighted down with some essence of fortune, of posterity. She holds it to her mouth and kisses it, then slides it back inside the pages of the magazine.

Ermmm......

Alix holds her breath as she absorbs the image. It is not what she was expecting at all. She cannot relate the girls in this photograph to the girls in the other photographs. She cannot believe that they are the same people.

What happened to the girls to change them so much

I didn’t even have a key to our flat. I just used to have to wait in for him to get home from work.

Jojo’s got what you might call an elastic relationship with the truth.”

What has Josie lied about?

She’s not ready to leave. Not even slightly.

The others too.

“Well, you could see how annoyed he was. And then he seethed the whole walk home.

Josie was the one upset after the dinner

swear,” he says. “I swear.”

Will he fall for Josie's trap?

The name on the card”—she turns to Alix and nods, just once, as if she already knows something—“was Miss Erin Jade Fair.”

Josie killed Nathan

‘Where’s Alix? Is she coming? Is she coming?’ “I said yeah. She’s coming. She’s in an Uber. She’ll be here soon. And then… Well, he tried to leave. Yeah.”

“Yes. He was part of the thing, part of the act, you know. The subscribers loved my dad being there.

Aw he was just an old man bonding with his daughter

Really close. In fact, Brooke and I ended up being, like, together, you know? I’d always known I was gay, from a really young age. But Brooke was my first girlfriend,

Woah

And then I started seeing Walter—”

She has told of surviving her ordeal by sucking on the strands of a floor mop in a bucket of dirty water left on a shelf in the cupboard where she’d been abandoned.

was breaking free. It was all happening. It was all within reach. And I think she knew it.

the night she came home and found Roxy kneeling over the white-clad body of Brooke Ripley with tears coursing down her cheeks, wailing, “I didn’t mean to do it, Mum, I didn’t mean to do it.” And Erin standing in the doorway, staring and rocking with her hand to her mouth,

She is so sure that that is the truth. So incredibly sure.

Is this really the truth? What is the truth