None of This Is True: A Novel

After two days, Alix asks Josie where she will go next. However, Josie doesn’t have an answer, and Alix unwillingly agrees that Josie can stay until Alix’s sister, Zoe, and Zoe’s daughter, arrive to visit on Saturday. Josie wants to talk about her own daughters on the podcast, and Alix agrees.

The narrative shifts to the Netflix documentary, in which Alix interviews Mandy, the school manager. Mandy is surprised that Alix knows Josie, as the families are so different. Mandy relates that when Josie and Walter came to school after Roxy broke another child’s finger, Mandy had been shaken by how emotionless they were. When Alix later asks Josie herself about the incident, Josie claims that she never told Walter about it.

On Monday morning, Josie puts on Alix’s robe and goes downstairs. Alix’s son, Leon, asks how Josie’s daughters can already be adults if Josie and Alix are the same age, and Josie explains that she had her children when she was very young. After Alix and Leon leave, Josie explores the house. She looks at the children’s drawings and remembers her own daughters’ drawings, about which their teachers had been concerned. She finds a small drawing of a girl and a dog and puts it in her pocket. Upstairs, she discovers a pull-out sofa bed in the study and realizes that she won’t have to leave when Zoe visits.

In the Netflix documentary, Alix interviews three people who follow Erin’s online persona of Erased on a gaming website. They watch live streams of her playing, as do thousands of others. They relate that one night while they watched, Erin disappeared from her chair, and they heard shouting and banging in the background of Erin’s audio feed. Their online community began messaging to try and discover Erin’s true identity, but before they could, the story came out, shocking all of them.

The narrative returns to the present. When Alix returns from taking the children to school, Josie has makeup on, which Alix thinks may be her own. She does some household chores but is uneasy by how happy Josie seems despite her recent ordeal.

In the Netflix documentary, Josie tells Alix about Brooke, Roxy’s only friend. Josie says that Brooke spent a lot of time with Roxy at the Fair house, until one day, Roxy got into a fight with Brooke. Afterward, Roxy disappeared for three days before returning home and telling Josie that Brooke and Walter were having sex. Soon afterward, Roxy left home again and has never returned.

In the narrative present, Alix is surprised by this new revelation from Josie’s background, and she is also shocked that Josie didn’t do anything about Walter’s behavior. Alix wonders what Walter might do now, but Josie says she doesn’t know, because she has never left him before. While they talk, Josie feeds Fred bits of their lunch, baguette and baba ghanoush. When Josie asks if Nathan ever hit her, Alix is surprised, and tells her no, but Josie reminds her that she has Nathan’s alcohol addiction to worry about. Alix believes that Josie wants Nathan to be as bad as Walter.

The next morning, Alix reminds Nathan of Zoe’s visit on Saturday. She asks him to stay home while Zoe is there because she doesn’t want her sister to judge her. Josie comes downstairs, carrying her bedding. Fred has diarrhea from the baba ghanoush and has made a mess of the room. As Alix cleans the floor of the spare room, she looks forward to the weekend, when Josie will leave. Later, Alix sees her neighbor’s son and asks him for details about Roxy and Brooke. He remembers the fight between the two girls and tells Alix that Brooke’s last name is Ripley. She googles Brooke and finds Facebook posts about her disappearance. When she puts fresh bedding on Josie’s bed, she finds a key under the mattress. It sports a bloodstained label with the number six. Alix leaves it where she found it.

In the Netflix documentary, Alix interviews Brooke Ripley’s aunt, who posted on Facebook about her niece’s disappearance, and learns that on the night of the prom, Brooke went to the dance and then parted ways with her friends afterward. They have video footage of her getting on the bus but don’t know where she went after that.

Josie is still wearing the clothes that Alix gave her on Saturday, even though her own clothes are clean. When Alix offers to pick up clothes for Josie from her apartment, Josie refuses. When Josie mentions the sofa bed in the study, Alix realizes that she has lost control of the situation. She wants Josie gone, but she is worried that they won’t finish the podcast if she fails to accommodate the other woman. She tells Josie that she will check with Nathan about using his study.

Alix goes to her favorite café to get some space since Josie now dominates her house. Alix can’t stop thinking about the key she found and doesn’t like the fact that Josie is alone in her house. She decides to return home and finish the podcast as quickly as possible. While Alix is gone, Josie makes herself lunch, noticing that the untidy kitchen doesn’t match with the image that Alix presents on social media. She finds a strip of photos of Leon in a drawer, along with one of Nathan’s business cards, and puts them both in her pocket.

In the Netflix documentary, Alix interviews Katelyn Rand, who is younger than Josie but grew up in her neighborhood and knows about her relationship with Walter. Recently, Katelyn ran into Josie at Stitch, and when she said she was acting, Josie asked for her phone number. A few days later, Josie called, saying she had a job for Katelyn.

Back in the narrative present, Alix leaves the café, walks to Josie’s house, and looks in the window. There are no signs of struggle, and the house seems abandoned. While she is there, a bus goes by, and Alix thinks of Brooke, who had gotten off the bus just minutes from the Fair home.

When they begin their next interview, Alix is annoyed that Josie is drinking from her favorite mug and suspects that she is doing so purposefully. When Alix asks what happened to Brooke, Josie claims not to know. Alix then brings up Erin again, wondering why Josie never talks about her, but Josie avoids the subject.

In the Netflix documentary, Josie tells Alix that her home changed after Brooke disappeared. She implies that she found child pornography on Walter’s laptop. Afterward, she continued to live with Walter but distanced herself from him. Two years ago, she got Fred for company, and in the interim, she claims that Walter began abusing Erin, going to her room every night. Josie confesses that whenever this happens, she puts in earplugs and stays in her room. Alix can’t help her shocked reaction to this admission, and Josie becomes defensive, saying that Erin never came to her for help and instead reverted to eating only baby food. She tells Alix that she hasn’t seen Erin in nearly a year, but the longer she waits to go in her room, the harder it gets. Josie also tells Alix that the night she arrived at Alix’s house for help, Erin had gone to a friend’s house. Hearing this, Alix now wonders how that can be possible, given Erin’s supposedly reclusive lifestyle. She remembers Walter’s warning about Josie and now wonders if he was telling the truth.

Josie is still wearing Alix’s clothes—her own are clean, but she doesn’t want to wear them, and Alix hasn’t offered her any others. Alix and the children have left, and Nathan is in the garden, working on his laptop. Even though she knows he is avoiding her, she goes out and chastises him again. He brings up her departure on Saturday before leaving for work, slamming the door on his way out. Now alone in the house, Josie goes into Alix and Nathan’s bedroom and searches Nathan’s pockets until she finds a baggie filled with white powder, a napkin with a phone number, and a hotel key. She puts everything in her pocket, planning to use the items for her own ends later. When Alix returns, Josie informs her that she will go to Pat’s house on Saturday. They decide to spend the next two days finishing the podcast.

The narrative shifts to the Netflix documentary, in which Josie describes that, on the night of the dinner party, Walter had purposely worn cheap clothes and gotten a bad haircut to embarrass her. She claims that because of Nathan’s absence, Walter was enraged by the time they got home. She was angry, too, and accused him of grooming her and Brooke and abusing Erin. When she ran into Erin’s room and told her daughter to pack, Walter hit her with the remote control and began to beat her with it before returning to the living room, acting like nothing happened. Josie took Erin, Fred, and her purse and left the house.

Alix finds Josie’s story compelling, but it doesn’t quite add up. She wonders what happened in all the hours between when they left her house at 10:00 pm, and when Josie returned at three. When she probes for more details, Josie embellishes the story, but it makes even less sense. Josie gets defensive, and Alix reminds her that the podcast audience will be listening as if this is fiction and looking for plot holes. Alix continues to ask questions about that night, trying to find out where Erin went, but Josie erupts in anger and leaves the studio.

Josie wakes up knowing that she will leave Alix’s house that day. She loved the homey dinner of take-out curry with the family the night before. She goes downstairs in her own clothes and tells Alix that she is going to Pat’s house. After she leaves, she confirms that the money she withdrew all week is in her purse and slips on a pair of Alix’s sunglasses that she stole that morning.