Why We Lie Read online

  ADVANCE REVIEWS

  “Amy Impellizzeri is incredibly talented! She turns the truth topsy-turvy in this sinister and surprising tale of greed, politics, and power. Timely and thought-provoking—this is exactly what psychological suspense is meant to be. A winner in every way.”

  Hank Phillippi Ryan, nationally bestselling author of Trust Me

  “Set against the backdrop of Washington politics, fundraising and non-profits, Amy Impellizzeri’s Why We Lie takes the red hot marital suspense genre and gives it a twist: what if both halves of the couple are lying? A relationship thriller planted firmly in the relationshipoptional age, Why We Lie asks readers to examine everything they think they know about their partners...and question everything they don’t.”

  Jenny Milchman, USA Today bestselling/Mary Higgins Clark award winning author of Wicked River

  “A labyrinth of subterfuge that will have you turning pages as fast as you can to get to the ending, which is as timely as it is shocking.”

  Liv Constantine, international bestselling author of The Last Mrs. Parrish

  “I loved it!”

  Barbara Bos, Women’s Writers, Women’s Books

  “Take a brilliant plot concept, populate it with complex and relatable characters, then wrap it all in an intimate writing style that is equal parts ‘heart’ and ‘head’ and the result is Why We Lie—one of the first truly-great suspense novels of 2019. This is a book that dares to look at the truth behind the art of lying and exposes its value to humanity, society, and individual sanity.”

  Kristopher Zgorski of BOLO Books

  “Why We Lie is a timely novel covering current issues surrounding honesty, social media, politics, and workplace culture. Amy Impellizzeri’s background as a corporate litigator provides the framework for her novel while her creativity ignites the suspense.”

  Suzy Approved Reviews

  “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET, CIRCA 1603

  “Unless you’re Oprah, ‘Be Yourself’ is terrible advice.”

  ADAM GRANT, NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED, JUNE 4, 2016

  ALSO BY AMY IMPELLIZZERI

  Lemongrass Hope (Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2014)

  Lawyer Interrupted (American Bar Association, 2015)

  Secrets of Worry Dolls (Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2016)

  The Truth About Thea (Wyatt-MacKenzie, 2017)

  Why We Lie

  Amy Impellizzeri

  Softcover Edition ISBN: 978-1-948018-35-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2019932301

  Library Edition Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-948018-34-0

  ©2019 Amy Impellizzeri. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Wyatt-MacKenzie Publishing, Inc.

  www.WyattMacKenzie.com

  Contact us: [email protected]

  DEDICATION

  To My Parents, Mike and Kathy Shelley,

  The first ones to teach me that it is never ever ok to lie.

  I love them anyway …

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  First edition of The Washington Truth, dated June 1, 2014

  Excerpt from the Op Ed piece, by Nate Essuzare

  …Some say launching a newspaper named for the truth is redundant.

  Skeptics say the opposite.

  I’d suggest that maybe every media outlet these days is trying to balance how much honesty we can all take.

  Maybe—hear me out—we can’t actually handle all the truth, all the time.

  Then again, monitoring one’s innermost thoughts and feelings sounds a lot like censorship and no one wants to talk about that in a newly launched newspaper. But there is research that shows that success—at least in the professional and relationship arena—might require a little discipline, a little monitoring, and yes, a little censorship.

  In short, success does not always hinge on telling the truth. Success just might hinge on figuring out what people want you to say. And saying that instead.

  But that’s not what The Washington Truth is setting out to do. So let’s all see how successful this new venture turns out to be, shall we?

  Chapter 1

  (April 2014, A small town in Pennsylvania)

  Chelsea traced the letters on the arm of the wooden bench distractedly. Years and layers of BFFs and True Loves Forever and the errant foul word littered the soft wood under her fingers. She had been coming here since she was 12—the arbitrary age her mother deemed her old enough to cross the Route 497 intersection on two wheels without supervision. More recently, she’d been visiting the bench more often. There seemed to be an incessant amount of free time, despite taking as many extra shifts at the diner as she could stand.

  The wooden bench hadn’t always been there. It was placed near the lake with a memorial plaque one summer—Chelsea couldn’t remember which one—and she had watched over time as the bench became a seat for scrawling, carved graffiti but for nothing else. In fact, other than her, Chelsea couldn’t remember anyone actually using the memorial as a chair.

  Memorial for whom? She wondered suddenly. Chelsea wrenched her head over the back of the bench and studied the weathered plate upside down from her angle.

  Agnes Lewis. Beloved Wife, Mother, Grandmother, Great-grandmother, and Friend. 1905-2003.

  Chelsea dropped back down in her seat and shuddered, doing the math.

  98 years. What must Agnes Lewis have seen and done in 98 years? She had lived over 4 of Chelsea’s lifetimes.

  Chelsea didn’t really think she had it in her to live out this lifetime, let alone three more. This is what she told her therapist week in and week out. This was hard. Living these days was almost more than she had energy for anymore.

  The guilt and the sadness.

  The heaviness.

  God, she missed feeling light. She missed waking in the morning and still believing the day had life.

  Her newest therapist, Dr. Flannery, told her to keep a gratitude journal to counteract her increasing hopelessness. He had given her a bright orange notebook with “Be the Sunshine in Your Own Day” scripted across the front in curled, nearly illegible letters. “Write in it daily,” he said. “Focus on the life and promise around you.”

  Chelsea had started using the journal as a mockery. A way to make fun of her clearly inexperienced and joke-of-a-therapist who seemed to represent the upper limits of her meager medical insurance policy. For weeks, Chelsea had been filling the orange
notebook with snarky comments and lines–adding scribbles and doodles in the places where gratitude was supposed to lurk. Her therapist seemed to be growing weary when they met last. He told her that maybe she would like to investigate other therapists. He’d given her a list of reputable people in her zip code who took her insurance. She had felt defensive then. She’d gotten back into therapy because she’d started to feel like her mother had given up on her, and now she felt like maybe Dr. Flannery was giving up on her too, so she decided to try a bit harder. If they were going to break up, she wanted to be the one breaking up with him. And she wasn’t ready to leave therapy yet. She at least knew that much.

  Chelsea had nodded stoically. “I’ll use the journal for actual journaling,” she’d promised. “Can we maybe meet on Mondays instead of Fridays? I’m less snarky because I’m less tired at the beginning of the week.” Dr. Flannery looked skeptical while he agreed. They were scheduled to meet the very next Monday.

  Meanwhile, Chelsea wrote in the journal. She journaled about her step-dad and how she hoped he’d start dating soon. How she was rooting for him. She journaled about her new shifts at the diner. And about her mother.

  Chelsea had also started journaling about Rafe. Long detailed entries about exactly what he’d done to her.

  And not done.

  The truth finally. She’d recorded the truth. Although Chelsea had not been sharing those entries with her therapist yet, she felt that the fact she could write it down honestly showed promise. So much so that she wanted to continue with the therapy for the time being.

  The writing? It was actually helping. It may have been the first thing to do so.

  Under the glaring sun, with splintered wood scraping her legs under her too short waitressing skirt, Chelsea finished up the latest entry about her mother. If the journal was a way to keep her mother alive—even this way—it might not be so bad after all.

  After so many hours on this bench, today she felt lighter. Maybe this eyesore of a journal would work after all. Maybe she’d get stronger. For real this time. Strong enough to leave town now that Rafe was in jail. Strong enough to move on to a new relationship. Strong enough to start over.

  Chelsea pushed up from Agnes Lewis’s rotting memorial bench with renewed strength, and thought: In the future, there will be a time when I will no longer be afraid to tell the truth.

  But even as the thought was forming in her brain, Chelsea suspected she’d have to tell a great many more lies to get to that point.

  Chapter 2

  (Five years later, April 2019, Washington D.C.)

  The television volume at the nurse’s station was louder than it needed to be. I was trying to focus but all I could hear was the background noise debating the possibility of war in a small country that I wasn’t quite sure I’d ever heard of before. Funny how the bloody mess of the world can become so inconsequential when your small corner of the world starts to cave in on itself.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen, Jude.

  “Mrs. Birch. Do you need water? Are you all right?”

  My vision came back into focus and I realized I had nearly fainted.

  I reminded myself that I was only looking at pictures of a brain. Not a brain itself.

  “Mrs. Birch. Do you need water?” Dr. Drake was repeating himself. As I calmed down, I wondered how much repeating he’d had to do in this meeting. I was losing my sense of time and place. I pinched the skin on my fingers to try to get some feeling back in them. Everything was going numb.

  It was not a new feeling. I had been feeling this way—numb and light headed—on and off since the night of the shooting three months earlier. As I’d waited for Jude to come out of surgery on that night, all the lead stories, on every local channel, had basically begun the same way.

  Jude Birch, newly sworn-in Congressman, is the apparent victim of stray bullet in gang fight to the death in Anacostia neighborhood. Congressman Birch not expected to make it out of surgery.

  But that was nearly three months ago. And Congressman Birch did indeed make it out of surgery, and beyond. As we drove the route to meet Dr. Drake at the hospital earlier that morning, I’d noticed the cherry blossoms were bursting along the trails of the Washington D.C. Mall. It was my favorite time of year—and yet—everything inside me felt dead as I stared hypnotically at the backlit images on Dr. Drake’s wall.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen. I love you, Jude. And that’s the truth.

  I had been repeating this mantra silently and quite often in the three months since the surgery. During the surgery, the hospital had given us a private room. It turns out that hospital security and confidentiality rivals the best security detail on Capitol Hill, and I should know. Even though Jude was brand new to Capitol Hill at the time of the shooting, I’d already had my fair share of interactions with the illustrious U.S. Capitol Police.

  I waited for Jude to come out of surgery while trying to ignore the news reports. I knew they didn’t have accurate information about the shooting or Jude’s condition. I was the only one who had actually been there, and no one had been permitted to talk to me. The press stayed away from our private hospital room, unbidden and unknowing. And I was left alone with my affirmations and mantras.

  After surgery, I kept everyone away. I wanted Jude to myself. I sat with him for days while he was in a medically induced coma, and later, while I waited to see if he would wake from the delicate surgery required to remove a bullet from his brain.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen.

  I repeated the mantra often as I moved through a new routine in our home—a routine that included seemingly incessant physical therapy and occupational therapy for Jude. Round-the-clock care even when I was home. Which I tried to be as often as I could.

  In fact, in those early months after the shooting and the surgery, my time with Jude was only interrupted by afternoons of respite care supplied by Jude’s best friends, Huck and Finn, that filled me with a gratitude that surpassed anything I had felt from the flood of calls, food deliveries, and other overwhelming support we’d gotten from our D.C. community.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen.

  I had tried to protect Jude, and I’d failed. But now, I was focused on getting him well. And—although he didn’t know it yet—getting him out of D.C.

  Dr. Drake ignored my inner monologue and pushed onward.

  “So, Mrs. Birch.”

  “Dr. Drake, please call me Aby.”

  I was forever reminding Dr. Drake of this. He would reluctantly comply before lapsing back into his Mrs. Birch salutations and I’d have to begin the reminders all over again. He never reciprocated by saying— “Sure, call me, Dan.” But still I felt ridiculous being called Mrs. Birch after the shooting—like I might turn around and find out my late mother-in-law had been sitting behind me this whole time.

  “This is the CT scan we took that first night to get images of the bullet’s location before surgery.”

  That first night.

  I had to work hard not to chuckle at the irony. I have a lousy habit of laughing when I am uncomfortably stressed. It was something Jude was always trying to help me through, you know, before the shooting. When appearances seemed to be more important to him. In meetings with Dr. Drake, Jude largely sat mute next to me letting me do all the speaking, a point of regret and relief. It seemed all of my feelings after the shooting became mixed ones. I became aware how much more black and white my world had been previously. Even though I always felt so angrily ambivalent about it.

  The grey zone seemed to really emerge after the shooting.

  Mrs. Birch, this is the CT scan we took that first night.

  Dr. Drake meant, of course, the night we first arrived at the hospital—the night we first met Dr. Drake—who just so happened to be the on-call neurosurgeon at the university hospital. But I didn’t remember it that way. I didn’t remember it as the first night. I thought of it as the last night. The last night of our old lives.

  That’s w
hy I was sitting in Dr. Drake’s office three months later asking him to make sense of the nonsensical for me. By all accounts, Jude was healing. Dr. Drake went so far as to keep saying Jude was healing nicely. The therapists who came in and out of our Brookland home in Northeast D.C. said he was making remarkable progress. They said I should be overjoyed. But I didn’t feel overjoyed.

  I looked at the images Dr. Drake had pinned up on his wall morosely for me and tried desperately to make sense of the coiled shadows. Dr. Drake pressed his finger up against the films backlit on a screen affixed to the wall. His finger grazed the clear lines of the silhouette of a bullet, and I shuddered at the grey and white shadows, thinking again about how close Jude had been to death.

  “So again, these are from that first night,” Dr. Drake repeated. “And these,” Dr. Drake backlit a new second row of films dramatically, “are the pictures we took today.”

  I tilted my head left as if the images were lopsided and that might help. It didn’t.

  Even to my layperson’s eyes, it looked as if these were two different people’s brains. It was more than the fact that the bullet was missing in the second set of films. The shape, the shading, all of it was different in the second set.

  “I don’t understand. How could his brain have changed that much in three months? It doesn’t even look like that brain should belong to the same person as that one.”

  “I couldn’t agree with you more, Mrs. Birch. Jude’s brain is healing itself in a way we have literally never seen before. He’s very lucky, your husband. His prognosis was very grave that first night. But things have really turned around.”

  That first night.

  Here we go again. Why does he keep calling it that?

  “What does it mean?”

  “We’re not sure. It could be fine. It could mean all good things.”

  “I hear a but, Dr. Drake.” Of course there was a but. I had come here for a follow-up appointment that hadn’t been scheduled, for more scans and to remind Dr. Drake to call me Aby, and finally, to hear the but.