We Were Liars
Praise for
we were liars
Youre 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 its 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 Dont Even Think About It and Gimme a Call
Dark, gripping, heartrending, and terrifyingly smart, this book grabs you from the first pageand 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 authors 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 Childrens 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 familys 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. FriendshipFiction. 2. LoveFiction. 3. FamiliesFiction. 4. AmnesiaFiction.
5. WealthFiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.L79757We 2014
[Fic]dc23
201342127
Random House Childrens 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 doesnt matter if divorce shreds the muscles of our hearts so that they will hardly beat
without a struggle. It doesnt matter if trust-fund money is running out; if credit card bills go
unpaid on the kitchen counter. It doesnt matter if theres a cluster of pill bottles on the
bedside table.
It doesnt 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.
2
MY FULL NAME is Cadence Sinclair Eastman.
I live in Burlington, Vermont, with Mummy and three dogs.
I am nearly eighteen.
I own a well-used library card and not much else, though it is true I live in a grand house
full of expensive, useless objects.
I used to be blond, but now my hair is black.
I used to be strong, but now I am weak.
I used to be pretty, but now I look sick.
It is true I suffer migraines since my accident.
It is true I do not suffer fools.
I like a twist of meaning. You see? Suffer migraines. Do not suffer fools. The word means
almost the same as it did in the previous sentence, but not quite.
Suffer.
You could say it means endure, but thats not exactly right.
MY STORY STARTS before the accident. June of the summer I was fifteen, my father ran off
with some woman he loved more than us.
Dad was a middling-successful professor of military history. Back then I adored him. He
wore tweed jackets. He was gaunt. He drank milky tea. He was fond of board games and let
me win, fond of boats and taught me to kayak, fond of bicycles, books, and art museums.
He was never fond of dogs, and it was a sign of how much he loved my mother that he let
our golden retrievers sleep on the sofas and walked them three miles every morning. He was
never fond of my grandparents, either, and it was a sign of how much he loved both me and
Mummy that he spent every summer in Windemere House on Beechwood Island, writing
articles on wars fought long ago and putting on a smile for the relatives at every meal.
That June, summer fifteen, Dad announced he was leaving and departed two days later. He
told my mother he wasnt a Sinclair, and couldnt try to be one, any longer. He couldnt smile,
couldnt lie, couldnt be part of that beautiful family in those beautiful houses.
Couldnt. Couldnt. Wouldnt.
He had hired moving vans already. Hed rented a house, too. My father put a last suitcase
into the backseat of the Mercedes (he was leaving Mummy with only the Saab), and started
the engine.
Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest. I was standing on the lawn and I
fell. The bullet hole opened wide and my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a
flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound,
then from my eyes,
my ears,
my mouth.
It tasted like salt and failure. The bright red shame of being unloved soaked the grass in
front of our house, the bricks of the path, the steps to the porch. My heart spasmed among
the peonies like a trout.
Mummy snapped. She said to get hold of myself.
Be normal, now, she said. Right now, she said.
Because you are. Because you can be.
Dont cause a scene, she told me. Breathe and sit up.
I did what she asked.
She was all I had left.
Mummy and I tilted our square chins high as Dad drove down the hill. Then we went
indoors and trashed the gifts hed given us: jewelry, clothes, books, anything. In the days that
followed, we got rid of the couch and armchairs my parents had bought together. Tossed the
wedding china, the silver, the photographs.
We purchased new furniture. Hired a decorator. Placed an order for Tiffany silverware.
Spent a day walking through art galleries and bought paintings to cover the empty spaces on
our walls.
We asked Granddads lawyers to secure Mummys assets.
Then we packed our bags and went to Beechwood Island.