46 pages • 1 hour read
Ashley ElstonFirst Lie Wins
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Interlude 2-Chapter 14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Interlude 2 Summary: “Lucca Marino—Eight Years Ago”
Years before taking her Evie Porter alias, but after her mother’s death, Lucca is working as a waitress at a fundraiser in Raleigh. She’s using a scanning device to steal and upload the credit card information of the attendees. Lucca is caught by her manager who turns her over to the police. Just before she’s arrested, a detective takes her into his car, gives her a burner phone with a saved number that she’s told to call, and lets her go. When Lucca gets home she calls the number and has a conversation with a mechanical voice that she dubs Mr. Smith. Mr. Smith has been covertly tracking her criminal activity and is impressed by her. Lucca meets up with Mr. Smith’s associate, Matt, who offers her a job. Desperate for money and to stay out of jail, Lucca accepts.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Present Day”
In the days after the Derby party, Evie receives no information from Mr. Smith about the Lucca-imposter. The imposter has made quick work of insinuating herself into the community of women in Ryan’s orbit, which frightens Evie. She decides to make an emergency call to Mr. Smith to ask him about Lucca. She learns that Mr. Smith planted Lucca as a test to see how quickly Evie would inform him of her, and as a reminder to Evie that she is replaceable.
Evie decides that, even though she doesn’t yet know what Mr. Smith wants from Ryan, she needs be prepared. When Ryan is called into an unexpected work meeting, Evie takes time off from work to rent a car and head to the East Texas property that Ryan disappears to on Thursdays.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Present Day”
Before infiltrating Ryan’s life, Evie received a brief on Ryan’s trucking company in East Texas that he inherited from his grandparents. Under Ryan’s grandparents’ control, the company brokered stolen goods, and Mr. Smith believes that Ryan has continued to maintain the company’s illegal work. Evie, disguised as a man, sneaks onto the trucking company’s property and enters Ryan’s office. As she’s rifling through his files, she hears men approach so she hides in the bathroom. Ryan and his associate, Seth, enter the office and call in a third man, Freddie, whom they interrogate about stealing from the company. Ryan believes that Seth will cut off Freddie’s fingers if he doesn’t tell the truth. Freddie confesses. Evie escapes after Ryan and Seth leave.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Present Day”
Ryan and Evie go to Home Depot to replace an old lawn mower. They run into James and the Lucca-imposter. Evie invites them over for dinner.
Interlude 3 Summary: “Alias: Izzy Williams—Eight Years Ago”
Lucca, using the alias Izzy Williams, infiltrates the home of Greg and Jenny Kingston by becoming nanny to their young son, Miles. While Greg works, Jenny, who suffers from a substance dependency, stays home, often incapacitated. Lucca was sent to the Kingston’s to find a USB drive and replace it with a corrupted drive. One day, Lucca finds a safe in the master bedroom. Lucca is able to deduce the passcode, but is caught by Jenny. Jenny, unable to maintain her balance, lunges at Lucca but falls and cracks her skull open. Lucca calls the emergency number, and Matt answers and tells her to get out of the house. Lucca, feeling guilty, calls Greg to tell him that Jenny needs an ambulance. Afterward, Lucca receives a call from Mr. Smith chastising her for getting caught by Jenny. He tells her that he will transfer her out of town for her next job since he can’t risk her being recognized by the Kingstons.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Present Day”
When James and the Lucca-imposter come over for dinner, Evie anticipates that Lucca will snoop in the house. Evie has planted a spreadsheet inside her dresser that looks suspicious but is actually meaningless; she wants to see what Lucca will do when she finds this. When Ryan and James go outside and leave the women to do the dishes, Evie confronts Lucca about her alias and asks her if she notified Mr. Smith about the spreadsheet. Lucca is shaken and confesses her imposter status. Lucca and James leave soon after.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Present Day”
The next day, Evie wakes to see on the news that James and the Lucca-imposter were killed in a car accident. Ryan is distressed because he had a fight with James outside while the women were in the kitchen. They decide to visit James’s parents to comfort them. To Evie’s dismay, the police are there. They question Ryan and Evie about the dinner party. Evie slips away and finds a brief from Mr. Smith among Lucca’s possessions. This brief instructs the imposter to enter Evie’s house and search her belongings. Evie is unsure of what this means about her job and relationship with Mr. Smith.
Interlude 2-Chapter 14 Analysis
This second section further develops the novel’s nonlinear structure, delving into the part of Evie’s life in which she began to use different aliases. Evie’s past interludes allow Elston to show the reader aspects of Evie’s character that Evie’s narrative would keep hidden from the characters in her present-day storyline. In the first section, this past-timeline characterization comes largely in the form of Evie’s relationship with her mother. Elston chooses not to show the death of Evie’s mother on the page; by the time the second section arrives, her mother is already gone. Eliding this crucial moment of Evie’s development from the text leaves how this loss impacted Evie’s decision-making and life choices ambiguous. Evie’s total commitment to working for Mr. Smith, for example, can be read as Evie trying to cope with her mother’s death by throwing herself fully into a line of work that will occupy her completely and demand her absolute attention. This is an essential part of the novel’s exploration of Duty and Decency.
The theme of Duty and Decency further develops in the interlude of the Kingston job, showing that, despite her mother’s death, Evie is still very committed to the importance of the family unit. In the Kingston job, Mr. Smith asks Evie to complete a job that will fracture a family: Exposing Greg Kingston will surely take Miles’s father out of his life, and Evie’s encounter with Jenny Kingston results in Miles having his mother removed from his life. Evie is deeply ambivalent about how to handle this job; as she chooses to leave Jenny but call Greg to tell him what happened, she equivocates: “I wonder if Miles woke up and found her before his dad got there. No. I can’t think about him” (112). This quote encapsulates how Evie clings to the value of family even as her job destroys her marks’ personal lives. Evie’s choice to call Greg against Matt’s wishes prefigures how Evie will attempt to navigate this balance: She will always look for a compromise that allows her to get what she wants while still staying true to her ideals. Evie’s adherence to the family ideal is also expressive of her yearning for connection, essential to the theme of Community as a Source of Power.
Cutting back and forth between Evie’s past and present allows Elston to create tension in the narrative, especially through cliffhangers, a feature of thriller stories. The section on the Kingston job, for instance, immediately follows Evie’s surprising choice to invite James and the Lucca-imposter over for dinner. Keeping the reader from immediately seeing the resolution of this action allows the reader to hypothesize. By delaying narrative resolutions, Elston creates a change of pace and augments the thriller’s suspense.
Elston also creates tension in individual scenes. Evie’s infiltration of Kingston’s bedroom is a prime example. Evie enters the room while Jenny is in the adjoining bathroom: “Inching into that space, I stay perfectly quiet while I listen to Jenny sing off-key in the tub” (108). “Inching” immediately gives a sense of Evie’s mindset—she is anxious and very aware that the slightest misstep could blow her cover. The potential disaster that could come of her slow movement into the room is underscored by the “thin door separating” (107) her from Jenny. Elston uses the blocking of this scene to once again raise questions in the reader’s mind. The interludes create a layering of tension, as the action and suspense of the interludes overlay the halted action and suspense of the present-day plotline.
