My Best Friend Lied First

Hannah Rourke has trusted Sophie Lang for thirty years.

With her marriage.
With her daughter.
With the secrets she never told anyone else.

Then an anonymous package arrives containing a recording of Sophie’s voice from sixteen years ago.

And one sentence changes everything.

“What she doesn’t know is that I lied first.”

The recording is connected to Nina Calder - the woman who disappeared from New York in 2010.

The woman Hannah once told police she had seen leaving voluntarily.

There is only one problem.

Hannah never saw Nina leave.

For sixteen years, Hannah has lived with the lie she told investigators. She convinced herself it did not matter because Sophie knew what had really happened.

Now she is no longer sure Sophie knew anything at all.

As Hannah begins reopening the past, old assumptions start collapsing.

Nina may not have been running from the man everyone blamed.

Sophie knew more about Nina’s private life than she ever admitted.

And the friendship Hannah believed was built on loyalty may have been built partly on something far more dangerous:

the belief that loving someone gives you the right to decide what is best for them.

But the most disturbing discovery is not only what Sophie did.

It is what Hannah did after believing her.

Because sometimes the first lie does not cause the second.

Sometimes it simply makes the second easier to tell.

And when Hannah discovers that Sophie’s recording is connected to Bellmere, the secretive Manhattan society whose members were promised their darkest confessions would be destroyed, another question emerges:

Why has a confession from 2010 survived at all?

And why has someone chosen Hannah to hear it now?

My Best Friend Lied First is a gripping psychological thriller about friendship, betrayal, a missing woman, buried guilt, dangerous assumptions, secret societies, and the devastating difference between helpi