None of This Is True

The central mystery of Josie Fair resolves as a horrifying inversion of the story she has been feeding Alix. After ingratiating herself into Alix's home and life, Josie kidnaps Alix's husband, Nathan, using money secretly withdrawn from her own daughter Erin's bank account. Nathan is held captive and dies from an overdose of sedatives while Josie keeps him prisoner at a lakeside holiday lodge in Ambleside; his body is found in the lake. Around the same time, police raid Josie and Walter's flat and find Walter dead and Erin barely alive, locked in a closet. Roxy, the daughter who vanished years earlier, resurfaces and demolishes the narrative Josie had constructed for the podcast: Walter never abused Josie or Erin, and it was Josie herself who was controlling, manipulative, and abusive. Josie's mother corroborates this, describing a lifelong pattern of Josie sabotaging relationships and manufacturing victimhood.

A nationwide manhunt fails to catch Josie, who escapes justice entirely. Before disappearing, she sends Alix a voice message insisting Nathan's death was a tragic accident and that she only meant to help Alix by removing him from her life; she begs Alix to tell the world she is a good person. Brooke Ripley, Roxy's former friend and secret girlfriend who disappeared years before, is finally found dead, her body hidden in an old car in a garage behind Josie and Walter's flat. Erin, recovering from her ordeal, tells Alix that Josie murdered Brooke in a fit of jealous rage. Alix, now widowed, uses the many hours of interviews she recorded with Josie to produce a podcast series, which becomes a commercial and critical success during the pandemic; she eventually sells the rights for a Netflix documentary titled "Hi, I'm Your Birthday Twin!" In her final episode, marking a year since Nathan's funeral, Alix publicly denounces Josie as evil for never being caught. Josie, still on the run and living under a disguise, sends one last bitter letter insisting she was misrepresented and that everything terrible said about her is a lie.

The novel's closing pages complicate even this. Sixteen months later, a disguised Josie overhears strangers discussing the podcast on a bus and privately reconstructs her own version of events: that Roxy, not she, killed Brooke in a violent outburst, that she and Walter covered it up to protect their daughter, and that Walter's death was a heart attack brought on by the stress of Josie threatening to expose the truth. She clings to the belief that she is fundamentally a good person, leaving her culpability for Brooke's death and Walter's fate deliberately ambiguous within her own mind.

A bonus chapter, narrated from Erin's perspective, resolves this ambiguity for the reader: Roxy did kill Brooke, strangling her in a rage after being left out of prom, and Josie and Walter covered up the murder to protect her. Erin witnessed the killing as a child, and the trauma drove her into years of self-imposed isolation. Now living uneasily with Roxy, Erin feels guilt over having let the world blame the dead Josie for Brooke's murder, while Roxy remains unrepentant and confident the lie will hold. In the book's final beat, Erin secretly begins composing a message to Alix, hinting she intends to reveal the real truth and push Alix toward making a new show, leaving open the possibility that the full story will one day come out.