The Lies My Best Friend Told
She was the one who stole the project proposal from my desk, then told her husband I was just a new hire, eager to learn.
She was the one who wired ten million dollars from his account, claiming it was to buy me a starter home, a place to finally be secure.
She was the one who sold the luxury car he’d given her as a wedding gift, saying it was just to get me a reliable ride.
And when she was caught transferring company assets while sleeping with her husband’s assistant, she told him I was the mastermind who had manipulated her.
In the end, her husband, Ethan, had me sent to prison.
And in prison, her lover made sure I was silenced for good.
But then I opened my eyes. And I was back on the day it all began to unravel, the day of her husband’s first real accusation.
1
Every time Stella needed to meet her lover, she used me as her alibi. A girls’ day out. Shopping. A long lunch.
So when her husband, Ethan Blackwood, sent me yet another text demanding to know when I was letting his wife come home, I didn’t feel surprised. Just tired.
My thumb hovered over the screen, a ghost of a memory—of blind loyalty, of the countless lies I’d told for her—flashing through me. This time, I didn’t hesitate. I swiped and deleted the entire thread.
I had just smoothed a cool sheet mask over my face when my phone blared to life. My hand, still slick with serum from the packet, fumbled and accidentally hit the answer button.
His voice, tight with fury, crackled through the speaker.
“Anna. When are you planning on allowing my wife to return to her family?”
“Her son has been crying for three hours straight. Have you forgotten she’s a mother? How selfish can you possibly be? I let it slide before, but she has a child now, for God’s sake.”
“Let’s get something straight. I’m her husband. The card you’re swiping belongs to me. The car you’re riding in is mine. So what the hell is this new habit of having her block my number every time you two go out?”
“I’ve been patient with you, Anna. But I’m done. Don’t you think you’re a little… superfluous in this picture?”
Each question landed heavier than the last, his patience fraying into raw steel. But the anger simmering in my own gut was hotter. If it weren’t for his perfect, darling wife, I wouldn’t have ended up dead on a cold prison floor.
Just because I was the only friend she’d brought with her from our dusty hometown, I became her living, breathing excuse. The cover for all her dirty secrets.
Back then, I never knew what she was really doing. The truth is, once she got married, our connection started to fade. But the calls from Ethan never stopped. They’d come in, laced with confusion and anger, and I—like a fool—would cover for her.
I remember one night, he called long after midnight, his voice a furious whisper.
“What the hell are you two still doing out? It’s the middle of the night. How long does it take to get your hair done?”
Dazed with sleep, I almost told him I had no idea what he was talking about. But then a text from Stella lit up my screen.
【Just say we were at the salon! The one next to the spa. Tell him we decided to get massages too. Sister-special package. I already sent him a pic of the sign. Thx babe! U owe me one ;)】
And just like that, in Ethan Blackwood’s eyes, I became the villain. The toxic best friend single-handedly destroying his marriage. The next day, he sent me a warning text, and after that, I started pulling away from Stella.
But it wasn’t enough. In the end, she still threw me to the wolves to save herself. And Ethan, already primed to hate me, probably felt a sense of righteous victory as he watched me get locked away.
Not this time. I would not be her stepping stone again.
His voice snapped me back to the present. “Is Stella with you or not? Put her on the phone. Her son needs his mother.”
A cold, sharp smile touched my lips. I held the phone up, turning my head as if looking around my small apartment. “Stella? Honey? It’s Ethan for you.”
Silence, of course.
“Oh, shoot,” I said, my voice dripping with fake sympathy. “Sorry, Mr. Blackwood. She’s getting a blowout. The dryers are so loud, you know how it is. We’re at that new place on the corner? The one we went to last time?”
“She’ll call you when she’s done, I’m sure!”
The moment I finished the sentence, my face went slack, the smile vanishing. I jabbed the end-call button with my thumb.
Five minutes later, just as I was peeling the sticky mask from my skin, a violent pounding rattled my front door.
I pulled it open, and the force from the other side almost sent me sprawling. It was Ethan. And he’d brought a team of grim-faced men in dark suits. Bodyguards.
Before I could speak, two of them had me by the arms. I could only watch, helpless, as Ethan stormed into my apartment, his face a mask of rage. He tore through the tiny space, ripping open my closet, checking behind the shower curtain, kicking aside a pile of laundry. Every corner of my life, violated.
When he found nothing, he stalked back to me, his jaw tight.
“Where is she, Anna? The lights were on. I’ve been watching the building for the last hour. You never left. So enough with the shopping excuse.”
Seeing the raw, unhinged fury on his face, a bitter, satisfying pleasure bloomed in my chest. Let him burn. Let him feel a fraction of the helplessness I felt. Stella was off with her lover, and I was, as always, the designated scapegoat.
In his mind, thanks to years of Stella’s subtle poisoning, I was already guilty. My words meant nothing.
He saw the silence on my face and shot a look at his men. Their grip tightened. He stepped forward, his hand clamping around my jaw, forcing my head up. His eyes were chips of ice, sharp and cold.
“I’m going to give you one last chance,” he gritted out. “Where. Is. My. Wife?”
2
A laugh, sharp and mocking, escaped my throat.
“She’s a grown woman, Ethan. A mother, as you so helpfully pointed out. Her own mom couldn’t control her. What makes you think I can?”
His hand fell away from my jaw, but only for a second. It swung back, fast and hard, and the crack of it hitting my cheek echoed in the small room. My head snapped to the side, my eyes stinging, a coppery taste filling my mouth.
The more desperate he became, the more pathetic he seemed.
He bent down and snatched my phone from where I’d dropped it. He pried my fingers open, using my own thumb to unlock the screen. Then he started tapping it against my bruised cheek, a threatening rhythm.
“You think staying silent is going to work for you?” he sneered. “I got you the job at my subsidiary. I can make sure you’re out on the street by tomorrow.”
His gaze was murderous. He found my boss’s contact in my phone and hit the call button. But before it could connect, an idea seemed to strike him. He hung up and hit the video call icon instead.
The screen flickered to life, showing my boss, Mark, still at his desk, buried in paperwork. He frowned at the unfamiliar face on his screen, then his eyes widened in recognition.
“M-Mr. Blackwood?” he stammered.
“That’s right,” Ethan said coldly. “You know this woman?” He flipped the camera around to my face.
Mark nodded frantically. “Yes, yes, Anna. Is… is everything alright?”
“Does your company have a policy on plagiarism? On employees who steal their work? Or did you just not bother to ask how she was completing her assignments?”
As he spoke, he shot me a look, mouthing the words: Last. Chance.
I kept my lips sealed.
My defiance lit the final fuse on his temper. “Every single proposal Anna has submitted was stolen directly from one of my company’s internal servers!” he roared into the phone. “You will fire her, tonight. If you don’t, my legal team will be in touch with yours by morning.” He paused. “In fact, I brought a lawyer with me. I see you’re still in the office.”
He crossed his arms, leaning against my wall. The message was clear: Your move.
Any thought Mark might have had of defending me evaporated. You don’t cross the Blackwood empire.
A bitter laugh escaped me. “You can’t do this, Ethan. You have no proof. I could sue you for slander.”
He let out a short, ugly laugh. “This is bothering you? Oh, we’re just getting started. I’ll ask you one more time. Tell me where Stella is.” He leaned in closer, his voice dropping to a venomous whisper. “You took ten million dollars. You sold my car. And now you’ve taken my wife. I have given you far too much grace, Anna.”
The bodyguards tightened their hold, making it hard to breathe.
After getting Mark’s stammered confirmation that I was fired, Ethan smiled grimly and went back to scrolling through my contacts. A knot of dread tightened in my stomach.
“This is breaking and entering,” I choked out. “You can’t just barge in here. I’ll call the police.”
He didn’t even look up from my phone. “The police?” he said, as if it were the funniest thing he’d ever heard. “Please, be my guest. Should I dial 911 for you? Let’s see… who do you think they’ll arrest? The woman who orchestrated the disappearance of my wife and the mother of my child? Or me?” He finally looked up, his eyes glittering. “The last text I have from Stella says she was spending the night with you.”
His eyes lit up. “Ah. Found it.”
I watched in horror as he dialed the number for my landlord. A plan, desperate and risky, began to form in my mind.
3
With me standing right there, Ethan told my landlord I was breaking my lease and would be out by morning. When I tried to shout, to explain, one of the bodyguards clamped a hand over my mouth, muffling my protests. Hot, frustrated tears streamed down my face.
He was a fool. An absolute fool. If Stella had really given me the money for a house, why would I still be living in this rundown one-bedroom apartment?
He ended the call, his eyes burning with a rage that hadn’t cooled in the slightest. “Still not talking?”
The hand was removed from my mouth. I took a ragged breath. “Why don’t you ask your assistant?” I said, my voice cold and steady. “Maybe he knows where she is.”
For the first time, a flicker of uncertainty crossed Ethan’s face. He hesitated, then pulled out his own phone and dialed his assistant, Leo.
The moment the call connected, I heard a faint shuffling sound on the other end before it stopped abruptly.
“Mr. Blackwood? Is everything alright?” Leo’s voice was smooth.
“Find Stella’s location for me. Now. It’s an emergency.”
There was a calculated pause. “Sir, the last few times I drove Mrs. Blackwood to meet her friend, she would jump out of the car and the other woman—Anna—would just pull her away. She never gave me a chance to even say anything.” Leo’s voice took on a note of feigned helplessness. “I tried to follow once, but Anna yelled at me, told me to mind my own business. I didn’t want to overstep. I honestly have no idea where they’d go.”
I almost had to laugh. He was good. Just as good at shifting blame as Stella was.
Ethan hung up, his face a thundercloud. Before he could speak again, his phone rang. It was the nanny. The baby wouldn’t stop crying. He was inconsolable.
That was the last straw. Ethan’s face hardened into a mask of cold resolve. He gestured to his men. “Get her in the car.”
They dragged me out of my apartment and shoved me into the back of a black SUV.
“If you won’t talk,” he said, sliding in beside me, “we’ll do this the hard way. We’re going to check every single salon on this street.”
We pulled up to a strip of upscale boutiques and spas. He yanked me out of the car by my collar, forcing me onto the sidewalk. His bodyguards formed a tight circle around us, a clear show of force that immediately drew the attention of passersby. Within minutes, a crowd had gathered, phones held up, whispering.
Ethan, playing to the audience, announced that his wife had been led astray by her malicious best friend. It was all the crowd needed to hear.
“You can’t trust anyone these days,” a woman muttered loudly. “My cousin’s husband ran off with her best friend. Left her with three kids and a mountain of debt.”
“And look at the news! All those girls who get trafficked overseas, who’s the one who tricks them? It’s always a friend!”
“She doesn’t even look like she has any money. You’d think if she was that evil, she’d at least dress better.”
“That’s how they get you! They look all innocent and poor so you trust them! It’s always the ones you least expect.”
The murmurs grew into a chorus of condemnation. Ethan’s face was dark with grim satisfaction. He ordered his men to drag me into the first salon. The chicly dressed owner took one look at me and shook her head. She’d never seen me before in her life.
Of course she hadn’t. But this was the very salon Stella had sent Ethan a picture of countless times.
His control finally snapped. He grabbed a fistful of my hair, yanking my head back.
“You’ve been playing me from the very beginning, Anna!”
His men hauled me back out onto the street. “Call the police,” Ethan commanded. “And call the press. We’re going to search every business on this block. If I have to tear this city apart to find her, I will.”
A dark glint entered my eye. “The police?” I whispered, just loud enough for him to hear. “Why not call a few reporters while you’re at it? Make a real spectacle. Nail me to the cross for the whole world to see.”
He narrowed his eyes, then gave a curt nod to one of his men. “You heard her. Give her what she wants.”
A triumphant smile played on my lips. Yes, I thought. Make it big. Make it loud. Make it so public that Stella can never, ever crawl out from under the rubble.
4
The bodyguards dragged me from one boutique to the next, a humiliating parade of rejection. The answer was always the same. No one knew me. This world of five-hundred-dollar haircuts and diamond-dust facials was not my world. I couldn’t have been more out of place.
When we circled back, Ethan was on a video call with his son. Hearing the report from his men, he nearly crushed the phone in his hand. Through gritted teeth, he told his crying child goodbye, then ended the call and hurled the phone directly at my head.
The expensive device was fine. My forehead, however, immediately began to swell.
The crowd had grown, their sympathy for the heartbroken father palpable. They had heard the child’s desperate cries for “Mama,” and their glares turned to daggers aimed straight at me.
“What kind of monster does that? Tearing a mother away from her child. It’s just cruel.”
“Look at the expression on her face! No remorse at all. You’d think he was the one who wronged her.”
Just then, sirens wailed in the distance. The police arrived, followed closely by a pack of reporters, cameras already flashing. And behind them… behind them were two people I never expected to see.
My parents.
Ethan had brought them here. He had flown my parents in from our small town, feeding them the story of how I’d corrupted and kidnapped his wife. Their faces were etched with panic and exhaustion.
As they pushed through the crowd, Ethan gestured for the bodyguards to release me. The memory of my mother’s face in the prison visiting room—a mask of shattered disappointment—flashed before my eyes. Tears welled up, and I reached for her.
My arm was met with a stinging slap.
I clutched my hand to my chest, staring at her in disbelief. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her voice shaking with a mix of fury and shame. “We thought you were here working hard, making a life for yourself. What is this, Anna? What have you done?”
She was so overwrought she swayed on her feet. I reached for her again, but she recoiled as if burned.
“Mom—!”
My father caught her, steadying her, then turned his wrath on me. “Don’t you call her that! We don’t have a daughter. Not one who does… this! We could have been sold in our sleep by you and never known it!”
After everything that happened in my last life, my only plan had been to clear my name and go home to them. And now here they were, brought here by my executioner to serve as the final, public nail in my coffin.
I looked past them, searching for Ethan. He was standing off to the side, speaking in low tones to a police officer. Before I could call out to him, a sharp, searing pain exploded in my ear. My mother had grabbed it, twisting hard.
Tears of pain and betrayal streamed down her face. “You tell Mr. Blackwood where you took Stella! You tell him right now! If you don’t, you can forget you ever had parents. We are done with you!”
The crowd’s murmurs turned to outright shouts of disgust. I tried to cover my ear, which felt like it was splitting open. A warm trickle of blood ran down my neck. But before I could, my father reappeared, holding a thick wooden stick he must have broken off a nearby display.
He swung it hard against the back of my knees.
A scream tore from my throat as my legs buckled, sending me crashing to the pavement. The sudden movement made my mother lose her grip, but not before tearing my earlobe. Blood now flowed freely, staining the shoulder of my shirt.
Ethan walked over slowly, standing over me. He calmly informed my parents about the ten million dollars and the sold car. The color drained from their faces. They looked at me as if I were a monster.
“Our fault…” my father choked out, his voice cracking. “This is our failure as parents…”
Just then, a police officer approached Ethan and whispered something in his ear. Ethan’s expression hardened, his eyes turning to flint.
He looked down at me, then at his men. “Take her. We’re going to the property listed in her name.”
I knew where we were going. It was the place Stella had set up as the final piece of evidence to frame me.
It was her and her lover’s secret paradise.
It’s almost over, I thought, a strange sense of calm washing over me. It’s finally ending.
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