Lovers and Liars, page 1
BY AMANDA EYRE WARD
Lovers and Liars
The Lifeguards
The Jetsetters
The Sober Lush (with Jardine Libaire)
The Nearness of You
The Same Sky
Close Your Eyes
Love Stories in This Town
Forgive Me
How to Be Lost
Sleep Toward Heaven
Lovers and Liars is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Amanda Eyre Ward
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Ballantine Books & colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Darren Sardelli for permission to reprint “Recess! Oh, Recess!” from Galaxy Pizza and Meteor Pie by Darren Sardelli, copyright © 2009 by Laugh-A-Lot Books. Used by permission of Darren Sardelli.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ward, Amanda Eyre, author.
Title: Lovers and liars: a novel / Amanda Eyre Ward.
Description: First edition. | New York: Ballantine Books, 2024.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023052723 (print) | LCCN 2023052724 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593500293 (hardcover; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780593500309 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Sisters—Fiction. | Destination weddings—Fiction. |
Truthfulness and falsehood—Fiction. | LCGFT: Domestic fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3623.A725 L685 2024 (print) | LCC PS3623.A725 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20231117
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023052723
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023052724
Ebook ISBN 9780593500309
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Alexis Flynn, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Elena Giavaldi
Cover illustration: Emanuela Carnevale
ep_prh_7.0_146973917_c0_r0
CONTENTS
Dedication
Prologue
Part One
A Librarian in Love
Part Two
Follow the Money
Part Three
Strangers on a Train
Part Four
Welcome to Mumberton Castle
Part Five
What I Did for Love
Part Six
Plum Gin
Part Seven
Simon’s Surprise
Part Eight
Badly Behaving Grown-Ups
Part Nine
Secrets & Smoke
Part Ten
The Phoenix
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
_146973917_
For Kara Cesare,
Brilliant editor, true friend—
When I walk with you into the woods,
I know we will find our way home.
together with their families
Sylvia Peacock
&
Simon Rampling
invite you to their wedding
Sunday, July 13, 2025
at 11 a.m.
Mumberton Castle
ENGLAND
Civilians, Morning Dress (or Lounge Suits)
Serving Officers, Serving Dress
Ladies, Morning Dress with Hats
PROLOGUE
SYLVIE
On the night before her wedding, Sylvie Peacock could not sleep. She walked toward her window, where she could see the outline of Mumberton Castle. Moonlit treetops were a silvery ocean. The dawn songs of goldcrest and thrush would begin soon, but in the deep of the night: only silence. What was she doing in Northern England on the grounds of a crumbling castle? How had the last glowing embers of hope led her here, of all places, preparing to marry again?
Despite the castle’s grandeur, Sylvie missed the Coconut Grove Elementary School library where she worked, missed the thrum of a second-grade class choosing their weekly books, missed the smells of peanut butter and paper. Another chance at love had been intoxicating, but now Sylvie just wanted to go home to her rescue greyhound, Willie, and her bungalow on Hibiscus Street.
Sylvie moved toward an ornate armoire and touched her wedding dress, which she had picked out with the help of her best friend, Florence. They had spent a humid morning in bridal boutiques—Grace Loves Lace, Ever After Miami—before ordering Cuban sandwiches and strong coffee at their favorite café and finding the perfect dress on eBay: a long, swishy affair with a big bow in the back, a bustle, and pockets. Sylvie liked to tuck a tiny notebook and pencil in her pocket in case someone recommended a book she’d want to read later.
When she’d married for the first time, she was so young: twenty-five! Sylvie’s dress had been short and breezy, nothing more than a white sundress, really. She’d worn gold sandals, held a bouquet of wildflowers—swamp mallow, coral honeysuckle, Carolina jessamine. Alexander had called her his mountain girl even as they married in a bayside ceremony.
Alexander had been dead for ten years, yet Sylvie was still surprised every morning not to find him in the music room where he’d been choir director. Under his tutelage, the kids had sung David Bowie and the Beatles.
The new choir director taught the kids a Taylor Swift medley and Katy Perry’s “Firework.” When Sylvie heard music down the hall, she would stop whatever she was doing (securing book flaps with library tape, ordering more spine stickers) and let the sweet voices wash over her. She would reflect, in answer to the Katy Perry lyrics: Yes. Sometimes I do feel like a plastic bag drifting through the wind. Wanting to start again.
Sylvie’s gown was smooth against her fingertips. She thought about her sisters, Emma and Cleo, both now in England for her wedding. They had been strangers for so long. And yet, who else could understand the riot of uncertainty inside Sylvie: the shards of loneliness; a longing for her father’s cigar-and-soap smell; her terror of love’s entrapment?
When they were children, the Peacock sisters would climb the rocks behind their house to escape their mother. Sylvie was the smallest but insisted she did not need help summiting Skull Rock. She would glance back periodically, to make sure her sisters were protecting her from anything, from everything.
At the top, the three girls made a nest of tangled limbs. Sylvie sat in Emma’s warm lap as Emma played with Sylvie’s crimson hair. Cleo’s head rested on Sylvie’s shoulder. It seemed they were the only people in the world—they had each other, and joy, an endless Montana summer. The sisters pointed out stars and told stories about how they would fall in love and marry in the Bitterroot Mountains.
Sylvie had once believed her sisters would always be beside her, watching out for her. She’d counted on their protection. She could still close her eyes and remember feeling safe, sandwiched between them. Now, she knew that her sisters—and Simon—were liars.
In her pajamas, Sylvie sat down at a small desk Simon had placed in the corner of the room for her. She reached into the New Yorker tote bag she used as a purse, rummaged until she found a Bic ballpoint.
Sylvie ripped a clean page from a tiny notebook. She wrote:
I’m sorry, Simon.
I’m going home.
It’s over.
TWO MONTHS EARLIER…
PART ONE
A LIBRARIAN IN LOVE
1
Sylvie
Sylvie was in love.
She knew that everyone would think—her mother and sisters would surely think—that she was marrying Simon for his money. And, OK, Sylvie knew she would not mind being rich. And who didn’t dream of a wedding in a fairy-tale castle?
Sylvie’s sisters never answered when she called, no matter the time of day. Sometimes she would text, Hey, anyone free to chat this weekend? Mostly they would not reply. At all! It was hard to convince herself they were just distracted. It seemed as if something was very wrong between the three of them. Sylvie worried there was a secret her two older sisters were keeping from her. What could it possibly be?
Sylvie dialed Emma’s landline. Emma, the only one of the three Peacock sisters who had stayed in their childhood town in Montana, had a wall phone with a rotary dial, a curly cord, and a satisfyingly heavy earpiece. Sylvie decided the news of her whirlwind engagement should come through the wall phone. She bit her lip as it began to ring. One, two, three, four…after ring number five, Sylvie gave up.
Next was Cleo, who lived in Brooklyn. Cleo was always too busy to talk and prefaced even her calls to Sylvie with “I don’t have time to talk but…” Cleo never answered and didn’t answer now. When her assertive, somewhat bossy message came on—Leave a message for Cleo Peacock after the tone—Sylvie cut the line.
Should she call her mother, Donna? Sylvie paused. Whenever she called Donna, Sylvie hung up the phone miserable. Her mother had named her after Sylvia Plath. No, she would not call her mother just yet.
Sylvie decided to send a text. “I deserve this,” she told herself as she com posed a note with her thumbs on her tiny iPhone keypad. Her heart hammered in her chest.
What about Alexander? said the voice in her mind.
“Alexander is dead,” she responded. She added, to her sisters, to her father in Heaven, to her mother in the Margaritaville Retirement Community, to herself, “I am not a gold digger. I am a librarian.”
Her finger hovered over the “Send” button.
2
Cleo
Sylvie’s insane text arrived while Cleo was in therapy with Dr. Benjamin. Cleo’s longtime therapist had retired, and she was trying out someone new. When Cleo’s phone dinged, she glanced into her open-mouthed Gucci tote bag. Cleo was a criminal defense attorney—she could turn her phone over on a table and she could jam it into her bag, but she could never—ever—turn it off.
“Cleo,” said Dr. Benjamin schoolmarmishly, “I prefer my patients to silence their cellphones as soon as they enter—”
“Look,” managed Cleo, grabbing her phone. “Dr. Benjamin, look!”
Dr. Benjamin took the cell and examined Sylvie’s words with narrowed eyes. “This is a text message?”
“It’s from my baby sister, Sylvie,” said Cleo. “Sylvie’s first husband died ten years ago, when she was twenty-five. Sylvie never moved on. She’s been in the same house, in the same librarian job, just living the same life without Alexander for a decade. I’ve been worried about her for ten years. And then, a few months ago, she meets some guy online. A rich guy named Simon. An alleged rich guy. And look, now she says she’s getting married.” Cleo stopped and took a deep breath.
She opened her mouth to say more but couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Dr. Benjamin’s brow furrowed. He looked eighteen years old, Cleo thought. His fresh Ph.D. was framed on the wall behind him.
“And you mentioned that you and your sisters are estranged?”
“I wouldn’t say estranged.”
“What word would you use?”
Cleo tilted her head thoughtfully. She had large green eyes and freckles; as a kid she’d been nicknamed “Pippi Longstocking” until she’d cut her own hair with her mother’s pinking shears at age nine. She’d worn it short ever since. Cleo was a size four with long, lean muscles from private Pilates sessions.
“I’d use the word busy,” said Cleo. In truth, when Alexander had died, they had all been engulfed in shock and grief. Tragedy brought some families closer, Cleo guessed, but in their case, the opposite had been true.
At Alexander’s funeral, Sylvie had asked her big sister, “Why do you think he went for a drive that night, Cleo? Did I do something to make him go for a drive that night? What could I have done to make him go? What did he mean by needing some air?”
Cleo had held her tongue between her teeth. She should have told her sister the truth right then and there, let the chips fall, allow Sylvie to understand who Alexander had truly been. But Cleo couldn’t do it—she couldn’t add to Sylvie’s pain. Her entire life, Cleo had devoted herself to protecting her sisters.
So she’d said, “Sylvie, I have no idea.”
Since then a feeling of doom came over Cleo whenever Sylvie called: Every conversation, no matter how anodyne, was now heavy with betrayal. And in terms of Emma, Cleo had lent her a great deal of money for her fledgling business, writing two giant checks to Sweet Nothings, Inc., which (let’s be honest) was surely a pyramid marketing scam preying on disenfranchised stay-at-home mothers. After the second payment, Cleo had said, gently, that she couldn’t send any more. Emma had seemed to be avoiding Cleo after that.
“I’m not implying there’s anything wrong with being estranged,” said Dr. Benjamin. “At times, it can be healthy to have space from your family of origin.”
Sometimes, Cleo was caught off guard by flashes of memory. Brooklyn children on bikes would remind her of the way the Peacock sisters had careened around their childhood streets in a row, unstoppable. A photo of a snowy mountain could conjure the feeling of Sylvie’s hand in Cleo’s on the chairlift after a day of learning with their skis in “pizza pie” stance. A fancy pot de crème made Cleo think of the way she and her sisters had always counted the dehydrated mini marshmallows in their hot chocolate packets to make sure they were fairly distributed. They had shared everything: snow pants, toothbrushes, turtlenecks, knee socks, shampoo, hair bands, barrettes. In fact, Cleo’s favorite barrette belonged to Sylvie. It was made of braided ribbon that fell from the clip into her hair, deep blue and pink.
Benjamin’s office was brightly lit—the opposite of her old therapist’s office, which had been filled with yolk-yellow light from a ceramic lamp. As her mother had taught her, Cleo crossed her legs at the ankle, knees pressed together. The pose was a remnant of Donna’s drama-school training. Cleo’s right hip twanged and she vowed that she’d allow her daughter to sit however the hell she wanted.
If she ever had a daughter.
Was she going to have a child? Cleo was thirty-nine: Her dwindling fertility was one of the issues that had brought her to Dr. Benjamin in the first place. At this point, she probably couldn’t have a child. She wasn’t sure how she felt about this.
Also: Cleo was pretty sure she was in love with her best friend, Isaac, and not her longtime, live-in boyfriend, Danny. This was another dilemma she hoped to hash out with Dr. Benjamin.
“How does your sister’s engagement make you feel?” queried Dr. Benjamin.
Cleo closed her eyes.
“Can you name your feelings right now?” said Dr. Benjamin. “For example, fear…concern…curiosity?”
Cleo looked at him steadily. “I feel,” she said, “an overwhelming sense of futile anger and the sense that I am wasting four hundred dollars.”
Dr. Benjamin remained calm. Cleo imagined he was thinking transference, and maybe he was right. Because who was she angry at, really? Her mother, who had decided to name her after a suicidal Egyptian queen? Her father, beloved Police Chief Peacock, who had been so kind and selfless that it had set them all up for failure as they searched endlessly for a man like him? Sylvie, for jumping into love so suddenly it left Cleo questioning her choices? New York, and how it was making her into a brittle veneer of the lush girl she’d been when she arrived from college? Her other sister, Emma, for seeming so settled and at peace, her entire life an affront to Cleo’s meticulously planned escape from Montana? Herself, and if so, why?
“You’re angry,” said Dr. Benjamin.
“Yes,” said Cleo.
Dr. Benjamin nodded. He clasped his fingers together, rested them on his belly. He continued to nod. Cleo raised her eyebrows. “What do I do?” she asked.
Dr. Benjamin looked at her quizzically. “It seems like Sylvie is healing. Perhaps you’re jealous of her?”
Cleo exhaled forcefully, as if she’d been punched. Dr. Benjamin’s words seemed to ring in her ears. How could she be jealous of Sylvie, who had endured more than anyone should be able to survive? Sylvie was a victim, the family tragedy. If Sylvie was happy, what would that mean for the rest of them? Cleo felt—inexplicably—a wash of fear. She wanted a cigarette desperately, though she had quit smoking years before.
She looked at Dr. Benjamin, suddenly thankful for him, after all. She needed help, and here he was.
3
Emma
-$24,039.50
Emma could not believe her baby sister’s text message. Too late, Emma understood that Sylvie’s incessant phone calls had not been the entreaties of a lonely librarian becoming a bit of a whack job, but attempts to share her joy. Emma had waited and waited to have a nice stretch of time to talk (and one iota of energy to listen to poor, sad Sylvie) but the time had not come.
Instead, a text message about a wedding in a castle, followed by a second, jubilant request: “RSVP!”
Emma’s husband, Rich, strode into the kitchen, flanked by their sons. In Missoula, Montana, the sun was low by afternoon; a rogue flash of light fell on Rich’s hair, making it golden. His round face had been ruddy when they were teens, and years of beer and tour skiing had made his nose and cheeks permanently ruby-colored, especially when he was chilly.
