A Beautiful Lie - Softcover

Grant, Tanya

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593954068 ISBN 13: 9780593954065

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

In this juicy psychological thriller, home organizer Emily is invited to vacation at her beautiful and wealthy new client's summer home—but once inside, Emily doesn’t want to leave.

Every one of my home organizing clients is a fabulous liar.

They tell themselves they need to keep clutter in their lives for rainy days or just-in-cases. They hold onto things too tightly. Most people don't know how to cut to the heart of what's important and purge everything that's not.

That's where I come in. I can look into my client’s lives and see exactly what's weighing them down, and I get rid of it for them.

It sounds easy, but I’ll let you in on a secret: I have trouble letting go of things, too.

When Cap slides into my life with her neon signs and velvet hair bows and magnetic energy, I know I can't just let her walk away. Because one of the first rules of home organizing is that like belongs with like. And Cap and me? We're destined to be together.

She may not know it yet, but that's okay. I'd be lying if I didn't say the challenge is part of the thrill. And luckily for Cap, I'm not afraid of a little hard work.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

By day, Tanya Grant is a content design manager in tech, and by night, she writes twisty thrillers full of secrets, murder, and gossipy group dynamics. When not conducting highly suspicious web searches (for research!), she also writes romances. Her essays have appeared on HelloGiggles.com and Bust.com, and she's spoken about creativity on various podcasts. When she's not writing, you can find Tanya listening to the coyotes howl outside her Seattle-area home, drinking cinnamon tea, and chasing her two children.

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1

I'm beginning to think it's not going to happen.

I eye the doorbell of the Providence duplex warily, weighing my options. Ringing the doorbell twice is acceptable in most circumstances-after all, it's perfectly reasonable for someone to have missed a first, imploring ring. Maybe my client had headphones on or was in some far room where the two-tone notes didn't reach. But the second ring? By now she must have heard me, but the door's still closed.

It's already five minutes past our appointment time. I hope to god she's not standing me up.

I've never had a paying client fail to show, and this isn't how I wanted things to start with us. She's already making it awkward, because if I ring her tiny black button of a doorbell a third time, I'm admitting that there's been a failure on one of our parts. I don't want us to fail before we've had a chance to begin.

I consult the note on my phone and even cross-reference with a map app; the address is correct. A tidy duplex in a row of colorful houses-this one with white siding and a decorative row of black half-moon shingles stretched along the roofline like scales. Not fish scales, though, no. Something more whimsical than that, like the pattern of a mermaid's tail.

Two doors trimmed in glossy black paint.

Brass numbers tacked under identical black sconces: 11920A and 11920B.

My client told me A. But what if she told me wrong?

There's no doorbell camera on either door, which makes me feel the smallest bit better. If she wants to watch me struggle, she'll have to do it from afar. At least she doesn't have a front-row seat to my despair. At least when she meets me, she'll get to see the version of me I'm willing to show.

Pocketing my phone, I glance over my shoulder to where my sad little Honda languishes in the street. I'm double-parked, which she told me would be fine until I could unload my supplies, but I won't unload anything until she opens her door and confirms we're in this together, and why won't she open her door? I can't afford a ticket and I can't afford for her not to show up.

I'm going to have to ring the doorbell again.

My chest constricts as I mount the front step, but I plaster on the smile that graces every photo of me on my website-the website that she browsed, that she read to find my contact information. I'd remind her that she started this, but I'd hate for her to feel bad, so I'll wear my tidy, neat smile to match the tidy, neat house I'll leave her with if she'll simply open the-

Oh.

As if she heard my thoughts, the door to 11920A swings open and there she is, her slim body adorned with cutoff overalls and a brown leather apron that's tied at her waist and hung with sturdy tools. She makes the safety glasses shoved into her dark blond bun look like haute couture. Slides off a pair of thick work gloves to offer me a hand to shake, her nails painted a glossy dark green like she is a forest and I am a traveler who's wandered in to get lost in her depths.

The sunlight hits her just right, lighting up the planes of her face, and she's a painting come to life. Laughing brown eyes, a straight aristocratic nose. High cheekbones and a bitable mouth.

She aims a smile at me and says my name, and forget what I said earlier-this is divine timing. It was always supposed to be like this. The light on her alabaster skin and my heart skipping a beat.

She looks like me. And I look like her. It makes the earth feel unsteady beneath my feet, in a good way. Of all the doors in this city, I've swung open the one that can show me what my life might look like if I were someone else entirely.

"Emily?" She squints into the brightness of the early-spring afternoon, and it makes her nose scrunch in a way that I want to run my finger over. I wonder if I, too, have been kissed by a halo of sunlight. If I might borrow a little of her glow.

Her hand is still waiting for mine, so I shake it, glad I didn't bolt before she opened the door. There's something about her that makes me want to lean in and learn more. I'm too intrigued to walk away now. "That's me. And you're Cap?"

Her smile broadens. "That's what my friends call me."

So we're friends, then. It's just that fast.

"Sorry it took me a minute," she says, and I like that she can apologize, that she's not automatically right just because she's paying me. "I was trying to finish a quick project before you came."

"Oh?"

"I'm an artist," she says, which I knew from her intake form, but I let her tell me anyway. "Mixed media." She smiles sheepishly. "My studio's a mess. Part of where I'm hoping you come in."

"You found the right woman." I've spent the last few years curating my business to attract clients just like her, with a name-Stylishly Organized-that implies a level of taste and curation beyond utilitarian organizing, a website full of photos showing impeccable home transformations, and testimonials that sing my praises like I am the patron saint of drawer dividers. "Let me grab a few things from my car, and let's see what we're working with."

She doesn't offer to help me, but it's fine. I find a street parking spot a block away, but I'm distracted when I start to wrestle my Honda into the gap, and-oh god-I hit the car in front of me. The car's back bumper lets out a crunch of protest, accusing me of a crime far greater than what I swear is just a love tap, and when I look in the rearview mirror, Cap's still on her front porch, watching me.

Shit.

My cheeks flame with embarrassment. How could I have messed this up? And how long does a first impression last? Did her first impression of me end with us on her porch, smiling at each other, or is this still part of it?

I might have blown it.

My armpits are damp with the slight tang of panic when I return to the porch, this time carrying a bag of my supplies: clear lawn bags, cable ties, painter's tape, scissors, box cutters, label makers, markers, sticky notes, and a variety of other tools to help me wrangle her chaos.

"Parking around here's such a bitch," Cap says generously.She's trying to be kind about what she witnessed, but it's making things worse. It could have just as easily been her car I hit, and I would never have forgiven myself.

"I promise I'm better at-"

A rattling thump makes us both jump, the sound of something smashing into glass.

Cap's eyes go huge. "What was that?"

I shake my head, my heart rattling too, and we share a worried look. Together we tiptoe off the porch and skirt the front of the house, edging along the sun-bleached sidewalk to where a sparrow with crumpled wings lies in Cap's struggling flowerbeds.

"Poor bird," I murmur, trailing my eyes up to the smudge he left on the window. "He just wanted to get in."

Cap's face pales at the tiny violence, the fragile reckoning. "Silly thing," she whispers to the bird. "Don't you know you weren't invited?"

I want to spare her the tragedy of his dead body, offer her a kindness. I've been organizing houses since I was sixteen years old. This isn't the worst thing I've seen, not by far.

I kneel next to the broken bird and whisk a cleaning cloth from my bag, but when I lean down to wrap him in the cloth and lift him, the sparrow shakes out of his stupor and flies off with a twitch of his wings.

Only stunned, then, not dead.

Relief breaks over me.

Cap and I smile at each other, bonded now, together now, and I pocket the cloth.

"Oh, thank god," she says. "It's all uphill from here." And she leads me back to her house, opens the door, and lets me right on in.

2

I'm certain Cap hung the sign just inside her front entry to get a reaction, so I give her one, hoping I pass her test. "I like the juxtaposition," I say, nodding at it: FUCK OFF in neon...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2026
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593954068
• ISBN 13: 9780593954065
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 369
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: BERKLEY; https://www.penguin.com/?s=BERKLEY; ; Unit 2 Limavady Business Park; Limavady; County Londonderry; BT49 0HR; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar