Page 1 of This is Why We Lied

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PROLOGUE

Will Trent sat down at the edge of the lake to take off his hiking boots. The numbers on his watch glowed in the darkness. An hour away from midnight. He could hear an owl in the distance. A gentle breeze whispered through the trees. The moon was a perfect circle in the night sky, light bouncing off the figure in the water. Sara Linton was swimming toward the floating dock. A cool blue light bathed her body as she cut through the gently rolling waves. Then she turned, doing a lazy backstroke as she smiled at Will.

“Are you coming in?”

Will couldn’t answer. He knew that Sara was accustomed to his awkward silences, but this wasn’t one of those times. He felt speechless just looking at her. All he could think was the same thing everybody thought when they saw them together: what the hell was she doing with him? She was so damn clever and funny and beautiful and he couldn’t even get the knot out of his shoelace in the dark.

He forced off the boot as she swam back toward him. Her long auburn hair was sleek to her head. Her bare shoulders were peeking out from the blackness of the water. She had stripped off her clothes before diving in, laughing at his observation that it seemed like a bad idea to jump into something you couldn’t see in the middle of the night when no one knew where you were.

But it seemed like a worse idea not to follow the wishes of a naked woman asking you to join her.

Will took off his socks, then stood so that he could unbutton his pants. Sara let out a low, appreciative whistle as he started to undress.

“Whoa,” she said. “A little more slowly, please.”

He laughed, but he didn’t know what to do with the feeling of lightness inside his chest. Will had never experienced this type of prolonged happiness. Sure, there were times that he’d known bursts of joy—his first kiss, his first sexual encounter, his first sexual encounter that had lasted more than three seconds, graduating from college, cashing an actual paycheck, the day he had finally managed to divorce his hateful ex-wife.

This was different.

Will and Sara were two days out from their wedding, and the euphoria he had experienced during the ceremony hadn’t subsided. If anything, the feeling was heightened with every passing hour. She would smile at him, or laugh at one of his stupid jokes, and it was like his heart turned into a butterfly. Which he understood wasn’t a manly thing to think, but there were things you thought and things you shared, and this was one of the many reasons he preferred an awkward silence.

Sara gave a whoop when Will made a show of peeling off his shirt before he stepped into the lake. He wasn’t used to walking around naked, especially outdoors, so he ducked under a lot more quickly than he should’ve. The water was cold, even for mid-summer. Chills prickled his skin. He could feel mud unpleasantly sucking around his feet. Then Sara wrapped her body around his and Will had no complaints.

He said, “Hey.”

“Hey.” She stroked back his hair. “Have you ever been in a lake before?”

“Not by choice,” he admitted. “Are you sure the water’s safe?”

She thought about it. “Copperheads are usually more active at dusk. We’re probably too far north for cottonmouths.”

Will hadn’t considered snakes. He had grown up in downtown Atlanta, surrounded by dirty concrete and used syringes. Sara had grown up in a college town in rural South Georgia, surrounded by nature.

And snakes, apparently.

“I have a confession,” she said. “I told Mercy we lied to her.”

“I figured,” Will said. The incident between Mercy and her family tonight had been intense. “Is she gonna be okay?”

“Probably. Jon seems like a good kid.” Sara shook her head over the futility of it all. “It’s hard being a teenager.”

Will tried to lighten things up. “There’s something to be said for growing up in an orphanage.”

She pressed her finger to his lips, which he guessed was her way of saying not funny. “Look up.”

Will looked up. Then he let his head drop back as a sense of awe washed over him. He had never seen actual stars in the sky. Not stars like these, at least. Bright, individual pinpricks in the velvety black expanse of night. Not flattened out by light pollution. Not dulled by smog or haze. He took in a deep breath. Felt his heartbeat start to slow. The only sound was literal crickets. The only man-made light was a distant twinkle coming from the wrap-around porch on the main house.

He kind of loved it here.

They’d hiked five miles through rocky terrain to get to the McAlpine Family Lodge. The place had been around so long that Will had heard about it when he was a kid. He had dreamed about going one day. Canoeing, paddle boarding, mountain bike riding, hiking, eating s’mores by a campfire. That he had made the trip with Sara, that he was a happily married man on his honeymoon, was a fact that brought him more wonder than every star in the sky.

Sara said, “Places like this, you scratch a little bit under the surface and all sorts of bad things come out.”

Will knew that she was still thinking about Mercy. The brutal argument with her son. The cold response from her parents. Her pitiful brother. Her total dick of an ex-husband. Her eccentric aunt. Then there were the other guests with their problems, which had been amplified by the liberal amount of alcohol poured at the communal dinner. Which reminded Will again that when he’d dreamed about this place as a kid, he hadn’t anticipated that other people would be here. Especially one asshole in particular.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Sara told him. “This is why we lied.”