Page 2 of A Smile Full of Lies (Secrets of Stonewood #1)

Chapter

Two

ROS

My gut clenched as 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 screamed big 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.

And she wasn’t wrong.

God, it would be so fucking easy to get Knox to open up to me.

He already did in the quiet, in the little things.

In the way he brought groceries to my door without asking because he knew how little I had to spend on them.

In the way he still checked the mail for me like it was second nature.

In the way he looked at me like I mattered, even now, when I felt like I was falling apart from the inside out.

He talked to me more than he talked to anyone else in Stonewood, at least that I knew of. He trusted me.

And I was staring at an email asking me to burn that trust to the ground for profit.

A wave of nausea curled through me. Just the thought of Knox’s face if he ever found out made my skin crawl.

Could I fucking do something like that?

I swallowed hard. My bank account was low.

Dangerously low. The kind of low that made you start doing mental math at the grocery store, wondering how many more days you could stretch a box of ramen because my stubborn pride wouldn’t allow me to call Knox when things got too sparse.

So low it made my hands shake every time I opened my banking app.

And here was Nina’s voice in my inbox — sharp, shameless, and so fucking sure she’d finally found the story that would make my writing career blow up. Not because I wrote it, but because I lived next door to the perfect subject.

Because I had a front-row seat to someone else’s suffering.

It wasn’t fiction. It wasn’t mine.

And even if it could make me rich, even if it could solve all my fucking problems? It still wouldn’t be worth what I’d lose if I wrote the story.

Because if I did this? I’d lose Knox, and I wasn’t sure I’d survive that.

I sucked in a shaking breath and clicked reply, my fingers trembling as I typed out my response.

Nina, I can see why you’d think this would be a good idea, but I’m really not comfortable using Knox like that.

He’s a dear friend, and I respect his privacy.

If he wanted me to know details about his family’s murder, he’d have discussed it with me already.

I don’t want to profit off his trauma and tragedy.

It wouldn’t be right, no matter how profitable you think it might be, and I’m not that kind of girl.

Respectfully,

Rosalind

I hovered my mouse over the send button, my chest aching as my breath snagged on the edge of panic.

I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans, heat prickling down my spine.

Then I hit send and leaned back, my nerves still crawling under my skin.

Oppressive silence buzzed in my ears. I stared at the screen, half-expecting an immediate reply, but nothing came.

I had done the right thing. Hadn’t I?

The metallic scrape of a key in the deadbolt at my front door made my heart stutter. My spine snapped straight, every muscle locked, and I reached out, half-closing my laptop like I’d been caught looking at something I shouldn’t. I knew exactly who it was before the door even opened: Knox.

He’s been my neighbor since we were eighteen, when he bought the house next door to me and Gran to be close to the Stonewood University campus, a mere two blocks away from our street.

He’s been kind and attentive ever since, but after Gran died three weeks ago, he’s been more than that — solid, unwavering, and always there for me.

And somehow — despite everything that happened that fall four years ago, when everything else changed — we never stopped doing our Wednesday horror movie nights.

Not after his family was murdered days before my twenty-first birthday.

Not after the frat party less than a month later, when Thayer shattered what was left of me on purpose and laughed in my face while doing it.

Not even after I looked Knox in the eye and asked if he knew — and he didn’t answer me.

I took his silence as a yes, confirmation that he’d been covering for his best friend all along.

I guessed he’d been adhering to bro code or some bullshit like that.

I got pissed and slammed drink after drink like I could drown the betrayal in vodka and spite.

And that’s when I got roofied… when things went from bad to almost unspeakable.

But Knox found me and dragged me out of that party before anything worse could happen.

And then? Knox beat the shit out of the guy who dosed me.

After that, he let the cop who’d forced the issue drive me to the ER, then went to get Gran and brought her to meet me. He sat with us in that freezing fluorescent ER bay all night until I was finally discharged.

And maybe I should’ve pushed him away after that.

Maybe I should’ve changed the locks, slammed the door on him for good, drawn a line. But his whole goddamn family had just been murdered, and he still showed up for me, still took care of me, stayed, and made me a priority, even though he was gutted and his whole life was a fucking train wreck.

So no, I never asked for the key back. I couldn’t. And if I’m being honest? Some twisted part of me didn’t want to. Because even before Thayer and I imploded, it was always Knox who kept showing up for me. Quietly. Consistently. In all the ways Thayer never did.

And that guilt? It never really went away.

Not back then — when I was still with Thayer and Knox would show up with patient eyes and gentle hands and that infuriating ability to see me without needing an explanation.

And not now, either. Not after everything that had happened.

Not after Thayer shattered me on purpose and Knox helped pick up the pieces without ever asking for anything in return.