Chapters (51)
- Cover
- Praise for Sara Shepard
- Also by Sara Shepard
- Dedication
- PART ONE
- —
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- PART TWO
- Piper
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Piper
- Eighteen
- Piper
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Piper
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Piper
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Piper
- Thirty-Four
- Epilogue
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
- What’s next onyour reading list?
She kept trying to wrap her mind around who Graham truly was. He hadn’t been manipulative when they’d met—he hadn’t tried to convince her of memories that weren’t there. Only after she had the baby did it start to change. It was a trigger, maybe, from the memory of the baby he and Piper had together? Maybe something changed in his brain chemistry, same as how women’s brains changed after giving birth, and something about parenting made him violently irrational. But unlike Piper, who documented what Graham did, Lauren’s mental state was shakier. Graham was able to use her angry bouts and selective memory to his advantage. He would do anything to cover up that he was the bad guy—including making her think she was the one to blame. Lauren hated what had happened to Piper, but it had opened a door that might have otherwise remained shut tight. She shivered at the idea of living next to him still, believing so little in herself, trusting him implicitly with the baby . . .
Though as it turned out, Lauren and Piper weren’t the only ones Graham tricked. The day after his arrest, Lauren bit the bullet and called her mom. She was going to find out at some point. “There you are,” Joanne said as soon as Lauren answered. “Why haven’t you called me back?”
“What do you mean?” Lauren had asked.
Her mother told her she’d called often. On the house phone, she said, because she figured Lauren was always home because of the baby. The house phone. Joanne was from the generation who didn’t realize that even though some people still had landlines, few of them actually used them. “Graham kept answering,” she said. “He kept telling me you were busy. Mel called, too, and Gwen—he assured us you guys were great. But it was weird that we didn’t hear from you. We thought you were upset, but Mel started to worry something was wrong.”
On the heels of that, she also got a call from Gracie Lord. “Oh honey, I would have never come to you about this, because I thought you were going through enough,” Gracie started out, her voice heavy with regret. “But I was starting to wonder about Graham.”
“What do you mean?” Lauren asked, still suspicious about Gracie’s relationship with Graham.