Lies I Told(77)

Thank you to Catherine Wallace, Cara Petrus, Lillian Sun, Bethany Reis, and everyone at HarperTeen who has given my work a home and has worked so hard on this project. You are all incredibly talented and you make everything so easy for me. That is no small task.

Thanks to dear friends and colleagues M. J. Rose, Tonya Hurley, and Jennifer Draeger for being there.

Thank you to my mother, Claudia Baker, who always believes in me, and to my father, Mike St. James, for gifting me with words through our strange and mysterious writing DNA.

Lastly, I can never let an opportunity pass to thank Kenneth, Rebekah, Andrew, and Caroline. We’re in this together. I wouldn’t want to do any of it without you.





Excerpt from Promises I Made



When I think about what happened in Playa Hermosa, it’s not the gold that gets me. Gold is like money. Something tangible that can be obtained, lost, regained.

But trust, faith, love . . . Well, those things are a lot more tricky. Where do you find trust once it’s lost? How do you make someone believe in you when you’ve given them every reason not to? And how can someone love you when you’ve proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that doing so is dangerous to them and to everything and everyone they love?

Those are the kinds of things I thought about after Cormac and I arrived in Seattle. I was too numb to do much thinking before then, too focused on the growing distance between Parker and me, too busy imagining him in jail for a crime we’d all committed.

And then there was my mother. Renee. All the times she’d called me Gracie. All the times she’d pushed the hair out of my eyes, called me her daughter. It had been a lie. I’d known Cormac and Renee weren’t my biological parents. That Parker and I had been adopted by them to run cons with wealthy suburbanites as our victims. But somehow I’d believed that Renee loved me. That she was my mother in every sense of the word. I’d believed it even when Parker had called me out on my n?ivety, even when it set me against him, the one person who’d proved over and over again that he’d do anything for me.

Knowing that Renee had taken the gold, leaving us to clean up the mess, left me hollowed out, like all the little bits of love and security and hope I’d been accumulating had been sucked out of me all at once. I thought it would get better with time, that I’d adjust to the reality of the situation like I’d always done before. But this time was different. The emptiness was palpable, a black hole that seemed to gather more power with each passing day. Sometimes I thought I would disappear inside it completely.

We’d all sacrificed in the name of the Playa Hermosa con. Cormac was on the run, forced to be cautious even with the underground network of contacts we usually relied on. There was twenty million dollars in gold at stake; there had to be at least a few fellow grifters who would use information about our whereabouts as a get-out-of-jail-free card. In the meantime, that was where Parker was: in jail. I hadn’t seen or talked to him since the night of the Fairchild con. I didn’t even dare send him a letter, and the loss of him sat like a lead weight on my chest.

My sacrifices might seem insignificant in comparison, but they didn’t feel that way. I’d come to love Selena, the only real friend I’d ever had. And I loved Logan Fairchild and his parents, too. Stealing from them—especially with the knowledge of Warren Fairchild’s mental illness—had blown out the tiny light I’d kept burning in the darkest corners of my heart. The light that told me I was better than a life on the grift, that I was only doing it because I had to, because after a string of lousy foster homes and no contact with my real parents, Cormac, Renee, and Parker were the only family I had.

Parker had tried to show me the better parts of myself, to keep those parts alive, and I’d abandoned him in Los Angeles when I’d chosen to run with Cormac. Now I knew the truth about who I was, and I didn’t waste any more time trying to fight it. I spent the time in Seattle settling into the role of Cormac’s daughter as he worked to con a rich divorcée, hoping to get us flush enough to go after Renee and our share of the Playa Hermosa take. In the meantime, I waited for Cormac to follow through on his promise to get help for Parker, to go back for him or find him a lawyer, to do something to get him out of jail. I waited for five months, until I couldn’t wait any longer. Until the thought of Parker locked up started to unravel me.

Then I used everything Cormac and Renee had taught me and I did it myself.