Praise for
we were liars
“You’re going to want to remember the title. Liars details the summers of a girl who harbors a dark secret, and delivers a satisfying but shocking twist ending.”
—Breia Brissey, Entertainment Weekly
*“[A] searing story … At the center of it is a girl who learns the hardest way of all what family means, and what it means to lose the one that really mattered to you.”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred
*“Surprising, thrilling, and beautifully executed in spare, precise, and lyrical prose. Lockhart spins a tragic family drama, the roots of which go back generations. And the ending? Shhhh. Not telling. (But it’s a doozy.) … This is poised to be big.”
—Booklist, Starred
“A haunting tale about how families live within their own mythologies. Sad, wonderful, and real.”
—Scott Westerfeld, author of Uglies and Leviathan
“Spectacular.”
—Lauren Myracle, author of Shine, The Infinite Moment of Us, and TTYL
“A haunting, brilliant, beautiful book. This is E. Lockhart at her mind-blowing best.”
—Sarah Mlynowski, author of Don’t Even Think About It and Gimme a Call
“Dark, gripping, heartrending, and terrifyingly smart, this book grabs you from the first page—and will never let go.”
—Robin Wasserman, author of The Waking Dark
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2014 by E. Lockhart
Jacket photograph © 2014 Getty Images/kang-gg
Map and family tree art copyright © 2014 by Abigail Doker
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Delacorte Press,
an imprint of Random House Children’s Books,
a division of Random House LLC,
a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.
Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/teens
Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
We were liars / E. Lockhart. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: Spending the summers on her family’s private island off the coast of Massachusetts with her cousins and a special boy named Gat, teenaged Cadence struggles to remember what happened during her fifteenth summer.
ISBN 978-0-385-74126-2 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-375-98994-0 (library binding) —
ISBN 978-0-375-98440-2 (ebook) — ISBN 978-0-385-39009-5 (intl. tr. pbk.)
[1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Love—Fiction. 3. Families—Fiction. 4. Amnesia—Fiction.
5. Wealth—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.L79757We 2014
[Fic]—dc23
201342127
Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.
v3.1
For Daniel
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Family Tree
Part One: Welcome
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Part Two: Vermont
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part Three: Summer Seventeen
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Part Four: Look, a Fire
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Part Five: Truth
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
1
WELCOME TO THE beautiful Sinclair family.
No one is a criminal.
No one is an addict.
No one is a failure.
The Sinclairs are athletic, tall, and handsome. We are old-money Democrats. Our smiles are wide, our chins square, and our tennis serves aggressive.
It doesn’t matter if divorce shreds the muscles of our hearts so that they will hardly beat without a struggle. It doesn’t matter if trust-fund money is running out; if credit card bills go unpaid on the kitchen counter. It doesn’t matter if there’s a cluster of pill bottles on the bedside table.
It doesn’t matter if one of us is desperately, desperately in love.
So much
in love
that equally desperate measures
must be taken.
We are Sinclairs.
No one is needy.
No one is wrong.
We live, at least in the summertime, on a private island off the coast of Massachusetts.
Perhaps that is all you need to know.