White Lies (Book 1)

Chapter 39

Chapter 39

"Are you sure?"

I sucked in a quick breath. I was very sure. "Do it." Yet despite my sureness, I still couldn't help but shut my eyelids and brace myself as the scissors worked their magic.

My name is Jesabel Griffin. These days, I am many things. But a liar is far from what I am – at best, I guess I could safely describe myself as being a normal girl.

Normal. Huh. A word I never would have associated with myself in the past.

But Penny was helping me in my transition to normality – with one momentous hair decision at a time. The last few months have taken their toll. Life was slowly returning back to my small little town, despite everything that had happened. Jennifer Hockley and Robert Blight had been found and brought safely back to their families.

As it turns out, Alfred really did pay Noah to work for him. And he'd suffered the consequences. Noah Lincoln had been captured by the police just a stone's throw away from the abandoned theatre in Clark Country – with Robbie still in the back seat. Alfred had been right in his assumption – that Noah couldn't keep himself from getting caught. At least, not without Vanessa Lincoln sweeping his indiscretions under the rug.

But this was one thing she couldn't make disappear with a magic wand. No parole this time. Noah would serve time for everything he had done, and money couldn't buy him a way out of it.

Nate's mother, Vera Pierre, dropped her Ericson title. She had held a small, private funeral for Alfred here in Alistair. A way of closing this very long chapter in her life – and as a way of giving her children closure. Of reuniting and finding strength in each other, then burying the hatchet once and for all. It had been strictly family members only, except Nathan hadn't attended.

He simply couldn't. And I understood.

Robert and Jennifer were making a slow recovery. And when each of them had been ready, they had decided to give their official statement to the police – and to the entire world. They described in excruciating little detail what had happened to them, leaving no room for doubt in the collective imagination that Alfred had been truly, deplorably criminal.

They had been bound and kidnapped in the dead of the night, standing face to face and arguing in that small children's park. There were large, prominent gaps in their memory – due to the concoction of drugs which Alfred had used to keep them docile and subdued. Alfred had just given them enough food to survive, but it made little difference. Noah was the one who put them through the worst of it – mutilating where he could, cutting where it would leave deep, enduring scars.

Make no mistake. What Robbie and Jenny had to endure was nothing short of torture.

And as a result, Jennifer was now blind. Angry at the world, and deeply miserable. She took the first flight leaving for her home town in Alaska, where she could be in respite with her father and younger siblings. Her mother had truly deserted her. And because of that, she never found out the truth about her real father, the real source of their wealth – and never, ever needed to.

I was beginning to understand that keeping secrets, however small they were, was an altogether human defect. And not just some byproduct of being a pathological liar. It simply couldn't be helped. Everyone needed to indulge in this human fallacy in their own way – and every person you know had some small, hidden lie tucked closely to their chests.

Despite the groundbreaking work I'd been making in unlearning my previous habits, this secret knowledge of Jenny's parentage just happened to be my new white lie.