“Wait, you called Sam!?” Naomi says, baffled. “Not an ambulance?”
Faye stares at her, exasperated, and throws her hands out. “I was scared if I called an ambulance, they’d call the police… and…”
“And help a dying woman?” Naomi looks at Faye incredulously.
“Is that what you would’ve rather me do?” Faye says, pleading eyes narrowing. “Call an ambulance and then get hauled away to jail? Be the ‘psycho’ who killed Harlow Hayes?”
“Yeah, you know what, Faye? Maybe! Because then I wouldn’t have had to go through almost three fucking years of hell, thinking you were dead!” Naomi’s heart monitor starts to beep as she raises her voice.
“I know it was shitty of me, okay? I’m sorry.” Faye’s eyes fill with tears as she begs Naomi to understand. “But I had no choice. Sam said that he’d take care of it, that no one would ever have to know, but only if I became Harlow and left the old me behind.”
A ringing silence fills the room.
“Prison or pop star,” Faye says, red-faced. “What would you choose?”
Chapter 45
“But I still don’t understand why you didn’t tell me,” Naomi says. “I would’ve kept your secret if I had to. Even a month later. Or a year… I would’ve listened. Like I am now.”
Faye throws her hands in the air. “You were happy. You had a life. A good one. I was just constantly holding you back. I thought you would be fine…”
Naomi bites the inside of her cheek, tears stinging her eyes. “Well, I wasn’t.”
Faye looks down, not wanting to meet her eye. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. “But you can’t be mad at me for following my dreams.”
Naomi opens her mouth to argue with her questionable reasoning. But Faye doesn’t see things logically. She’s all emotion. No use getting in the way of what she wants to do or think. For now, Naomi decides to be happy she has her sister back.
“So what happened next, then?” she asks. “Once Harlow was… dealt with.”
The words feel sour on her tongue. She doesn’t bother asking Faye for details on the cover-up, having a good idea what happened. If Faye could pass for Harlow, Harlow could pass for Faye, so Sam took Harlow’s dead body to New York, put Faye’s clothes on her, and surrounded her with Faye’s personal effects. Naomi feels sick at the thought of Sam’s gloved hands undressing Harlow, then dosing her up with drugs so the police and coroner would assume that was the cause of death, and then lighting the building on fire so it would be hard to truly tell. So thatNaomicouldn’t tell.
She wonders how much Faye knew about the cover-up, but doesn’t ask, not wanting to know. Faye skips over this part too, instead launching into the explanation of how she truly transformed into one of the world’s most famous pop stars without anyone knowing.
“Assuming her identity was the easiest part. She didn’t even keep things in a safe, so her passport, IDs, wallets, etcetera were all so easy to get a hold of. I had access to everything—cars, private jets, bank accounts, and so on. When you’re that famous, the less checks you have to go through anyway. The most awkward part was cutting out colleagues and friends. Thankfully, I learned from Sam that she’d already cut out a lot of her family after a big fallout over money a year prior, so it was a select few I had to ghost while Sam hired me new teams to work with. It wasn’t that hard, I obviously had no emotional connection to them. I got a new phone, new number, and then if they tried Harlow’s social media or even tried to talk to me in person, I just ignored them. I didn’t enjoy that part, people calling me a bitch, but I had no other option, really.”
Naomi thinks of Trevor, picturing him walking up to Faye and her just blanking him. She was surprised Faye was able to do it, just ignore someone like that. She had her shortcomings, but she was always friendly and kind. Naomi gulps, feeling unsettled at this new image of her sister.
“But then there were the fans, especially the diehard ones, who we knew would be the hardest to convince. Sam and I both thought it’d be best if ‘Harlow’ lay low for a while. Take a hiatus. This would give me time to regroup, and also some time to undergo a few procedures to make sure I looked as much like her as possible and didn’t have to bother with the prosthetics anymore. He got me the best surgeons and stylists. They got me veneers, a nose job, buccal fat removal, lip injections, hair and eyelash extensions… By the end of it all, even I barely recognized myself. I wasn’t Faye Barnes anymore. Or just Harlow’s body double. I was the one and only, world-famous Harlow Hayes.”
Naomi imagines Faye enjoying her “hiatus,” being pampered while she suffered. It stings even more knowing what she was doing during that time, choosing not to contact her, to let her know she was okay. Naomi searches Faye’s Harlow-fied face, making sure it really is her sister in there. The familiar determined look in her navy-rimmed blue eyes—devoid of the green contacts she must usually don as Harlow—confirms it.
Naomi shifts in her hospital bed uncomfortably, thinking of how one woman was just replaced with another, like that. And how her sister still doesn’t seem to grasp that she just slotted into someone else’s life.Maybe it’s the trauma,she reasons.Her mind’s way of forcing her to not face the horror of it all.
The thought brings Naomi back to what led her here in the first place. The arrest of Harlow for the murders of Jade and Colton.
“If you didn’t start working as Harlow’s double until November 2021, then you don’t know what happened to Jade, I’m guessing, but what about Colton?”
Faye sheepishly bites her lip and shifts her gaze to the floor. “I know what happened to both of them, actually.”
Naomi’s heart sinks, praying Faye isn’t about to tell her she played a part in Jade’s death as well.
“I didn’t have anything to do with Jade,” Faye says quickly. “But…” She looks around the room before lowering her voice to a whisper. “I gave Colton what he deserved.”
Chapter 46
Rather than shrinking in on herself like she did when explaining what happened to Harlow, Faye holds her head up high as she details for a stunned Naomi what happened between her and Colton. How she’d had a crush on him ever since he started dating Harlow, saving magazine clips of him as a teenager, wishing it was her. So when he approached her at the VMAs last month, both of them single, she simply couldn’t stay away, even though she knew she should avoid him at all costs, like Sam had urged her.
Faye explains how her foolish act of sleeping with Colton and letting her guard down—thinking he’d never realize she wasn’t the same woman he’d been with for years—led him to discover her secret, and what she’d done to Harlow. How he used this as blackmail against her.
