Page 64 of A Smile Full of Lies (Secrets of Stonewood #1)

The Truth, The Noise, and The Aftermath

By Rosalind Cooper

It’s been three months since What We Buried in Stonewood released. Three months since a story I once thought would kill me found its way into the world.

In that time, I’ve been called a liar, a survivor, a whore, a hero, and a sellout. Sometimes all in the same sentence.

Thayer Williams’s family tried to stop distribution.

They failed. Courts upheld my right to publish the truth backed by verifiable evidence — including Thayer’s own recorded confession.

They issued a statement about ‘respecting the privacy of the grieving’, but it read like a press release written for an audience of mirrors.

Nina Frost launched her own book proposal. It didn’t sell. People were more interested in the woman who survived than the agent who sniffed around the bones.

As for the Nox Obscura fandom… well. That was louder.

Thousands of comments. Millions of views.

Some accused him of betrayal. Others crowned him a folk hero.

A smaller, nastier handful sent threats…

toward me, mostly. That’s the price of lifting a mask: the people living in the fantasy get angry when they have to face reality.

But here’s the truth: the man behind the mask never belonged to them. He belonged to himself. To his grief. To his ghosts. And now, that man belongs to me.

Philip Knox is not Nox Obscura anymore. He is my husband. My partner. The love of my life. The man who carried his family’s memory like a weight and let me help shoulder it.

And me? I’m not just the girl who survived. I’m the woman who told the story. And now I’m the woman who gets to decide where the story goes from here.

The noise hasn’t stopped, but I’ve stopped caring. Let them scream into their echo chambers. Let them hashtag his name until their thumbs bleed. We’ve built something louder than their outrage.

We’ve built a life. Together.

I closed the laptop without rereading the post. I didn’t need to. The truth was out in the world now — my words, our ghosts, everything we’d fought to bury and exhume all at once. It was already echoing across the internet, already being dissected and debated, already out of my control.

I stood and crossed to the desk in our study. The old oak drawers still smelled faintly of dust and varnish, but the bottom one was mine. I slid the key into the lock, turned it with trembling fingers, and pulled out the small white box I’d hidden there.

The test was still inside. The second pink line hadn’t faded. Positive.

My hands shook, but not from fear.

I padded barefoot through the quiet halls of Stonewood Manor, the silence humming with memory and new beginnings.

He was easy to find, like always. Out back on the veranda, sleeves rolled to his forearms, a glass of bourbon untouched beside him as he sketched in his notebook — plans for the future, because he was always making them.

“Knox?”

He looked up at the sound of my voice. His eyes went straight to my face, then to my hand, and the little plastic truth I held there.

For once, Philip Henry Knox didn’t have words. His mouth parted. His chest rose sharp, like the air had been punched out of him.

And then he was moving — up, across the space, closing the distance in long, desperate strides. He caught me up, arms iron-strong around me, crushing me against him like I was the only thing holding him upright. His laughter broke out raw and wet against my hair.

“You’re pregnant?”

I nodded, tears blurring the edges of my vision.

“We’re not just building a life anymore. We’re building a family, too.”

He pressed his forehead to mine, breath unsteady, voice low and reverent when he whispered, “My wife. My baby. My everything.”

And just as he said it, the sun broke through the heavy cloud cover, and warm golden light spilled across the veranda, enveloping us.