A Beautiful Lie

by Tanya Grant

Genres: General Fiction; Women's Fiction; Thrillers; Psychological Thrillers; Suspense

Synopsis

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.

Release date: September 8, 2026

Publisher: Berkley

Print pages: 368

Sample

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 green, the color normally associated with welcome, with entry. Green usually equals go, not go away, and it's a joke of hers, those bold letters, a wink, and when I tell her I understand, something inside her shines brighter.

She levels a grin at me and tells me it's one from her collection. This is what she does, the way she fills her days. She makes neon signs by hand to use in her art. None of those knockoff neon signs that are really a strip of LED lights bent into shape. No, she uses real glass tubes, bending and soldering them into letters, adding electrodes and different-colored gases to achieve the colors she wants. A nod to tradition.

The first floor of 11920A is Cap's workshop, home to all that glass and magic. It's where her tools live: her bending table and ribbon burners, her blackout paint, her nails and screws. Plotting paper and wire, hand torches and machines that look borrowed from a science lab. It's where she hangs that leather apron to reveal the rest of her outfit, a tight white T-shirt under those cutoff overalls, simple but devastating.

We might look alike, but Cap's outfit wouldn't have nearly the same effect if I wore it. Her simple clothes are transformed into something more beautiful and elevated because she's the one wearing them and because she wears them with confidence. I bet she's the kind of person who feels confident naked too, but that's not the kind of thing that's polite to think about your client, so I shove the thought away.

Still, my curiosity lingers.

The second floor of 11920A holds Cap's wardrobe and makeup, and this, she tells me, is part of the equation of her art. She takes those pretty neon signs with rude or quirky messages and photographs herself in their glow. She brings it all together in editing, adding eerie, abandoned landscapes in the background to help make her point.

The light-filled third floor of Cap's studio is where she shoots her photos in the huge, empty front room, where she edits on a laptop in a tiny back bedroom, and where she packs and ships prints to her customers.

I glimpse a print on top of one of the stacks on a messy table-in the photograph, the words JUICY CUNT cast a pink glow on Cap's inner thighs, and she wears her miniskirt hiked up high like an invitation. She's spread out on a sand dune, and I'm parched and she's the only thing that will quench my thirst.

"A bestseller," she smirks when she catches me looking.

I don't know her well enough yet to know the correct reply, so I simply nod and ask what we'll be tackling today. Cap's place is gorgeous, but it's also a disaster. Three floors of chaos and my two hands. I get the feeling that I'll be doing most of the work, that Cap will want to be pampered instead of a participant. I want her to trust me, and usually I hate the kind of clients who are so hands-on that the process takes twice as long as needed. But I wouldn't mind if Cap lingered, if she wanted to stay close.

"The whole place needs to be organized," she tells me. She drops her gaze with a nervous flutter of eyelashes. "I have a gallery showing next month, and there's a press tour in advance. A photographer's coming to take photos of the studio next Saturday, and I'm getting interviewed here. My mom would flip if it looked anything less than perfect, and unfortunately, I need her buy-in to keep this whole thing running."

"Oh?"

She frowns, but it's aimed at her mother, not me, and she tells me that her art's not quite self-sustaining.

"Yet," I promise, and she likes that.

"Yet," she agrees. Her voice has a texture that makes me think of her tongue dragging over my skin. "Part of why I need this feature and the show to work out." A wry twist of her mouth; of course I'm looking at her lips. I can be professional though, I swear. Just because I'm attracted to her doesn't mean it needs to get weird. "Honestly, this is why there used to be patron systems, you know. To fund the arts. Make it easier to be creative without worrying about the bills."

I don't roll my eyes and tell her how fucking wonderful it would be to have anyone float my rent so I could play with glass and makeup and self-portraits. Cap's mother is her patron, but because she's family, Cap doesn't see that it counts.

I let it go the minute she smiles at me like we're in on a secret and says, "Anyway, you're here to rescue me." Because, yeah, I'll be her white knight with a label maker, pulling her out of the mess she's created. Chaotic good, she calls it, but there's no such thing.

"Perfect," I say. "Then, let's begin."


The first step of organizing is the hardest, and it’s the part we need to tackle before Cap’s attention wanes: getting rid of things.

"If I had my way, I'd trash it all," she says, "but some of it's worth keeping."

People form attachments to things, if given a chance, or keep them for rainy days or just-in-cases. I've had a lifetime of experience letting things go, leaving my past behind, so this is where I can help the most.

For Cap, at least, it's easier in the studio because it's her place of business rather than her home. Less sentimentality, though I'll be clear that art is personal. Especially hers, where she bares so much of herself for strangers to see.

I wonder how she feels knowing that her portrait lives inside gorgeous picture frames, that she hangs on the walls of homes around the world. I bet she likes it. I bet it makes her feel good, even when those portraits are half-naked, an outline of her curves traced in blue neon by the words IT'S A BEAUTIFUL LIE.

This is the part where I admit I looked up Cap before I came, that JUICY CUNT isn't the first I've seen of her. After all, Cap isn't the kind of name you sign on checks, and I needed to know she was good for the money. And then, when I knew she was good for it, when I saw her art, I couldn't look away.