Cover

Title Page

The Lying Game #2:
NEVER HAVE I EVER

A LYING GAME NOVEL

BY

Sara Shepard

Epigraph

Epigraph

The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple.

–OSCAR WILDE

Prologue - Life After Death

Prologue
Life After Death

It’s the little things you miss when you die. The feel of sliding into bed when you’re exhausted, the clean scent in the Arizona air after a storm during monsoon season, the flutter in your stomach when you see your crush walking down the hall. My killer took all those things away from me just before my eighteenth birthday.

And because of fate—and a threat from my murderer—my long-lost twin sister, Emma Paxton, stepped into my life.

When I died two weeks ago, I popped into Emma’s world, a world that was about as different from mine as you could get. From that very first moment I saw what Emma saw, went where she went . . . and watched. I watched as Emma reached out to me on Facebook and as someone posing as me told her to visit. I watched as Emma traveled to Tucson, cautiously hopeful about our reunion. I watched as my friends tackled Emma, thinking she was me, and brought her to a party. I stood beside her when she got the note that said I was dead, warning her that if she didn’t continue to pretend to be me, that if she told anyone who she really was, she’d be dead, too.

I watch today as Emma pulls on my favorite thin white tee and swipes my shimmery NARS blush onto her high cheekbones. I can say nothing as she slides into the skinny jeans I used to live in on weekends and sorts through my cherrywood jewelry box for my favorite silver locket, the one that sends rainbow prisms around the room when it catches the light. And I sit silently by as Emma sends a text confirming brunch plans with my best friends, Charlotte and Madeline, even though I would’ve worded it differently. Still, Emma has the basics of me down cold—almost no one has noticed she isn’t me.

Emma puts my phone down, an uneasy look on her face. “Where are you, Sutton?” she asks aloud in a nervous whisper, as if she knows I’m close.

I wish I could send her a message from beyond the grave: I’m here. And this is how I died. Only when I died, my memory died, too. I have glimpses here and there of who I used to be, but only a few solid, fleshed-out moments have bobbed to the surface. My death is as much a mystery to me as it is to Emma. All I know in my heart, in my bones, is that someone killed me. And that same someone is watching Emma as closely as I am.