None of This Is True: A Novel

Alix is humiliated that she offered Nathan sex as an incentive to come home, and she is even more embarrassed that he didn’t comply. She can’t believe he is cheating, but the evidence seems irrefutable. She texts Nathan’s friend Gio, who tells her that they left Nathan in Soho at 1:00 am, and that he was alone. Alix doesn’t believe him. In the morning, Zoe suggests that they wait until the time when Nathan usually comes home before they start worrying.

That afternoon, Alix walks to Gio’s house and confronts him. He tells her about Katelyn but says that she only seemed friendly, not as if she wanted to have sex with Nathan. They left him with her, relieved because they wanted to go home, and he still wasn’t ready to end the night.

On Monday morning, Alix gets a call from a hotel and imagines that it is a penitent Nathan. However, the hotel clerk is calling because Nathan’s room was damaged, and they want her to cover the costs. She finds out that he checked in with someone on Saturday night, and that the hotel was booked in advance for two nights. Alix goes to the hotel and finds the room a mess, with a woman’s underwear on the floor along with a smear of blood. The manager shows her the security tapes, on which Nathan and Katelyn arrive. At 3:00 am, Nathan leaves the hotel. A car pulls up, and he hesitates before getting in. Alix notes the license plate number, and the manager tells her that the room was registered to Erin Fair’s credit card.

In the Netflix documentary, Alix interviews Katelyn, who tells her about Josie’s plan. Josie paid Katelyn 1,000 pounds to get Nathan to the hotel room and make it look like they had sex. Once she met him, Katelyn felt guilty about the plan, and Nathan spent the entire night talking about Alix.

Back in the narrative present, Alix goes to Pat’s house, but neither she nor Josie are there. She goes to Josie’s apartment, which still looks abandoned. At home, she contacts a police officer whom she interviewed in the past and asks her to look up the registration of the car that picked Nathan up. Upon learning that the car is a rental and was paid for by Erin Fair, Alix calls the police to report that Nathan has been kidnapped.

In the Netflix documentary, Alix interviews Detective Constable (DC) Sabrina Albright, who says that initially, they didn’t take Nathan’s disappearance seriously because of his history of alcohol addiction. However, when they received an anonymous call that reported both Erin and Walter missing, they put the name together with the hotel and car registration from Nathan’s case.

A newspaper article reveals what happened next: the police entered Josie’s flat and found Walter dead in the bathtub, tied up and badly beaten. Erin was found alive but beaten and tied to a chair. At the time of the article’s publication, she is still in a coma.

Two days after the discovery of Walter and Erin, there is still no sign of Nathan or Josie. DC Albright calls Alix and asks her to come to the station to identify some items they’ve found in Josie’s house: the hand soap, a Nespresso pod, her bracelet, the magazine, a teaspoon, Leon’s photos, and a drawing that Eliza had made. There are also several items that she doesn’t recognize, but she does identify a photo of Brooke Ripley. She tells the police about the key she found, but when she asks about her missing bumblebee pendant, they say they haven’t found it.

In the Netflix documentary, Katelyn continues her story of that night’s events. As part of Josie’s plan, she told Nathan that Alix was at the hotel in order to get him there. At one point, he tried to leave, and they struggled. She points to a scratch on her neck, and Alix remembers the blood on the floor. When Josie called as planned, Katelyn told Nathan that Alix was waiting outside. After he left the room, she sprayed her perfume and left her underwear, thinking that it was over.

On the last day of school, DC Albright calls Alix to tell her that Roxy Fair is at the station. When Roxy hears the story about Walter beating Josie, she is incredulous, and even more so when they tell her about Erin’s credit card being used. Roxy tells the police that Erin is a famous gamer called Erased, who makes her living through streaming subscriptions. The police ask where Josie might have gone, and Roxy suggests the Lake District, which Josie had loved. She tells them that Walter couldn’t have beaten Josie, and when they show her the photos that Alix took that night, Roxy is surprised to hear that Josie has a friend, and even more surprised to learn about the podcast. She vehemently denies Brooke’s alleged relationship with Walter, and when the police they tell her about Walter’s abuse of Erin, she tells them that he went to her room every night to participate in her gaming stream as a character named Pops. His participation was part of what made Erin’s streaming subscription so popular.

Alix meets Roxy at a café and tells her everything that Josie said on the podcast. Roxy asks if it is a true crime podcast, and Alix realizes that her podcast does indeed fall into this category. Alix interviews Roxy and her studio; Roxy tells her that Brooke was her first girlfriend, although no one but Erin knew the truth. When Roxy ran away, she wanted Brooke to come with her, but Brooke wanted to finish school. When Alix asks Roxy about the key, she guesses that it might open the family’s garage.

In the Netflix documentary, Alix interviews Clare and Georgie Small, who stayed in a Lake District vacation home next to Josie’s. They say that Josie clearly wanted privacy, and they respected that. After a few days, they stopped seeing her, although her car was still there.

Pat tells Alix that Josie was a needy child. When someone disappointed her, she cut them off. She also reveals that Josie met Walter when Pat had started dating him. When Alix is surprised, Pat reminds her not to believe anything that Josie has said. Pat realizes now that she should have seen what was happening, and shares her opinion that Walter did not groom Josie; instead, Josie set out to get him. After talking with the people in Josie’s life, Alix realizes that Josie manipulated her from the beginning. She is sure that Josie had a plan all along and now fears that Nathan is dead.

In the Netflix documentary, Alix again interviews the couple who now own Fred. Because they were on their honeymoon, they had no idea the police were looking for Josie. When they found out, they called the police, who found out where Josie had stayed. She had reserved the cabin for two weeks, although her neighbors reported that she left after several days.

That night, Roxy tells Alix that Erin should be waking up soon. They talk about why Alix undertook the podcast project, and Alix realizes that she was looking for a distraction from her own troubles. Her instincts told her not to get involved with Josie, but she ignored them. Alix listens to the recording where she tells Josie how she met Nathan. The conversation evolves into a discussion of whether a woman can be married and still be a feminist. Upon revisiting an earlier podcast in which a woman talks about how her husband’s death had allowed her to move forward, Alix connects the content of this podcast to Josie’s question of whether Alix’s life might be easier if Nathan were dead. Alix suddenly realizes that the clues to Josie’s criminal intent had always been there, and she had missed them.

When DC Albright calls at 1:00 am, Alix already knows what she is going to say. She drives to the cabin Josie rented, where the police are dragging the nearby lake. On the way, she gets a text from an unknown number—it is Josie, claiming that Nathan’s death was accidental. Josie claims that she only meant to keep Nathan so that Alix could realize how much better her life is without him. Josie still insists that she told Alix the truth and that everyone else is lying.

When Erin wakes up, Roxy and Pat are there. They tell her that Walter is dead, and Roxy tells her everything that has happened. The police find Brooke Ripley’s remains in the trunk of a car in the Fair’s garage. In the Netflix documentary, Alix interviews Brooke’s mom, who didn’t know about Roxy, and so had no idea that Brooke might have gone to the Fair’s house. Alix also interviews Roxy and Erin. Erin, who has now been officially diagnosed with autism, tells her story quietly. Josie was jealous of Walter’s relationship with his daughters and sabotaged his attempts to do fun things with them. When Walter traveled for work, their homelife had deteriorated further; Josie pulled Roxy out of school, pretending to homeschool her, and tied them to the “Naughty Chair” whenever they transgressed.

Erin and Walter became closer when he started participating in her gaming, and they had kept her endeavors a secret from Josie. He set Erin’s gaming up for monetization, along with a bank account. They had been planning to go to Erin’s first live gaming conference that summer, after which she planned to move in with Roxy. She thinks that Josie embarked on her plan because she sensed that a change was coming.

When Alix asks about Brooke, Erin tells her that on the night Brooke came over, Walter and Roxy were both gone. Erin heard Brooke’s voice and peeked out her bedroom door. She witnessed Josie hit Brooke, heard a terrible noise followed by silence. She never confronted Josie and only told Walter just before his death.

According to Erin, on the night of the dinner party, Josie yelled at Walter, calling him a pedophile and screaming at him. Erin heard a bang and came out of her room to find Walter on the floor, his head bloody. At this point, she attacked Josie with the remote control. Josie pushed Erin to the floor. Erin passed out, and when she woke up, she was in the closet, tied to a chair.

At Nathan’s funeral, Alix remembers that his mother died when he was young, and that his brother died by suicide. It is clear to her now that his drinking was a way of dealing with those events, and he didn’t come home because he didn’t want to subject her to his troubles.

In the Netflix documentary, Alix speaks to an interviewer in her studio. After Nathan’s death, she was unable to reenter the building. However, she realized that she had to make a living, and if she could bear to work with the material, she could finish the podcast. When the first episode was released, the podcast went viral, and people connected to the story began to contact Alix. A year after Nathan’s death, Katelyn Rand got in touch, and they arranged to meet.

When Alix meets Katelyn, she finds the woman likable despite her connection to the events surrounding Nathan’s death. Katelyn apologizes, saying that Josie claimed her intention was to expose Nathan’s infidelity. Katelyn thought she had been helping Alix. She is coming forward with her story now to help Alix be successful and free, which is what she thought she was doing when she initially got involved.

On the anniversary of Nathan’s funeral, Alix ends the podcast, which will now be turned into a Netflix documentary. Roxy and Erin are moving in together, but Josie still hasn’t been found, so there is no closure for the podcast. Alix’s only consolation is that as a fugitive, Josie is trapped. She reflects on the pointless deaths of Brooke, Nathan, and Walter, and tells Josie, in the final episode, that if she is listening, she is to blame for everything that has happened.

DC Albright returns the stolen items to Alix. Albright believes that when the money Josie stole from Erin runs out, she will have to surface, and they will catch her. After Albright leaves, Alix puts Eliza’s drawing back on the wall and asks Leon to clasp the bracelet that Nathan gave her.

Two months later, Alix gets a letter from Josie in which she claims that she is a victim, now of Alix’s podcast as well. She implies that Alix might see her again and warns her to keep her children safe; however, by the time the documentary broadcasts, Alix has not heard from Josie again.

Josie is on the bus, wearing her mask because of the Covid pandemic and eavesdropping on the girls in front of her. They are talking about Alix’s podcast, and while they think that Josie is “creepy,” they also believe that Roxy and Erin weren’t completely truthful. After they get off the bus, Josie toys with her bumblebee pendant. She remembers the night she found Roxy over Brooke’s dead body and called Walter. He told them what to do, and she, Roxy, and Erin had disposed of Brooke’s body. After Alix’s dinner party, when she told Walter that she was going to tell Alix the truth about Brooke, he clutched his chest and fell over, hitting his head. Then, Erin had beaten her, and she didn’t remember anything after that. She holds onto the fact that she has always tried to be a good mother and reaffirms to herself that that is the truth.