The Five Year Lie

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, emotional abuse, physical abuse, death by suicide, and sexual content.

Several months in the future, a nervous mother helps her young child use the bus station bathroom. A security camera evaluates her features and sends a message to a private phone saying that they have a match.

The novel returns to the present. Arial Cafferty reluctantly agrees to bring watermelon to her son Buzz’s preschool class graduation while she drops him off. He looks so much like his dead father that Ariel’s heart hurts.

Ariel has a trust fund and an easy office manager’s job at Chime Co., her family’s doorbell camera tech company. The company was founded by her father, Edward, and his brother Ray. Since her father died, Uncle Ray has run Chime Co. Ariel would rather spend time at her glass-blowing studio, but she comes in to work just as Ray is starting a meeting. As Ariel pretends to take notes, her phone gets a text from Drew Miller, Buzz’s father, asking her to meet him in an hour. Ariel is rattled; Drew, the only man she ever loved, died five years ago.