The Lies I Tell

At Ron Ashton’s fundraiser, Meg acts like a chameleon as she methodically eases her way into his inner circle by befriending his friends and securing them a crucial piece of real estate they didn’t bother to investigate for themselves. She planned her friendship with Monica, someone in his inner circle, and targeted her in a yoga class for six months. Once they built trust and a bond, Monica trusted Meg to help her secure a house she really wanted. Monica didn’t look into the details of the house, and Meg knew she wouldn’t, so she lied about the initial listing price, had Monica put down $200,000 more than the asking price, and told Monica she got the house for a deal. Ron Ashton wronged Meg’s mother, and she is seeking revenge, but even as she manages to slip him her business card since he’s seeking a new real estate agent (also her doing), she feels someone watching her, though she doesn’t know who.

Ten years prior, Meg Williams began to execute the con that ruined Kat’s life. It started with Meg’s need for a stable place to live to pull herself out of a rut. Ever since Ron Ashton cheated her mother out of their house, Meg has been living out of her mother’s van. Her mother had since passed away from cancer. She works the front desk at a YMCA and is best friends with a man named Cal, who knows about her precarious situation and tries to help her however he can, like by taking her out for meals. She supplements her other meals by going on dates with men from Circle of Love, an online dating app.

Meg wants to change the direction of her life, so instead of going for one-time dates, she wants to find somewhere she can move in. She uses her work computer and public libraries to try to meet men, and she drives past the house her mother lost to Ron Ashton, where she remembers the stories her mother told of the house’s origin. Her mother had a profound influence on her, and she fears her mother would be disappointed that she hasn’t made her own way. She doubles down her determination to get back at Ron Ashton for stealing her mother’s house. She decides to take the first steps toward this plan by finding a stable place to live and building up some income. That’s when she finds the perfect target, her former high school math teacher, now a principal at another school, Cory Dempsey.

Meg creates an array of fake profiles to pinpoint Cory’s type, and what she realizes aligns with rumors she’d heard during high school: Cory likes younger women who present as naive and in need of help. Meg remembers a popular, kind girl at her school, Kristen, who always helped Meg out, despite how “frumpy” or out-of-the-mainstream Meg was, because Kristen believed in what she called “girl code.” Kristen disappeared from school after rumors circulated of a relationship between her and Cory, her math teacher. Once Meg hones in on his type with a fake profile as “Amelia,” a 21-year-old surfer girl at community college who wants a serious relationship, Meg attracts Cory’s attention right away. She chats with him, and they agree to meet.

Meg goes to the coffee shop she sent Cory to, and she pretends to be stood up on her date as well, using Cal as a prop in her con by asking him to call her phone. Meg and Cory bond over their failed romances, and Meg feeds Cory all the things she learned about him through chatting with him as “Amelia,” winning him over. They agree to meet for a date on Thursday.

Kat was a junior reporter at the LA Times when she first heard of Meg Williams. Kat was trying to make her way as a journalist at a time when women weren’t taken as seriously. She was working on a story about a predatory principal, Cory Dempsey, who was arrested for having relations with underage students. Kat got an anonymous call with a tip to talk to Nate, Cory’s former best friend. Meg Williams, his girlfriend, is rumored to have set him up, emptied his bank account, and disappeared. Kat is intrigued by Meg’s story and wants to use the angle of Meg as a con-artist-for-the-greater-good as spin, but her misogynistic boss, Frank, isn’t interested in her take. Kat decides to pursue it anyway by reaching out to Cory’s mother, not knowing then that her pursuit of this angle and Meg Williams would ultimately destroy her life.

Meg plays on Cory’s desire for an inexperienced girl, and she finds herself staying at his house regularly. She invents a horrible roommate, Sylvie, at community college, hoping Cory will invite her in, but he doesn’t. So, she pretends she got kicked out of her dorm and shows up with all her things at his house. She pretends to resist his offer to let her stay, but he can’t resist the urge to save her and thinks this will speed up their sexual trajectory.

Meg uses Cory’s computer to delete her “Amelia” profile. Cory exhibits controlling behavior early on by telling her what to wear when they go to meet his best friend, Nate, who is immediately skeptical of Meg. She works to build routines with Cory, while seeing how much she can get away with. She moves things around and takes things from him. Cory calls her in the middle of the day and asks her to bring him a binder he needs for work to the front office. She instead approaches him directly at school, where he’s chatting flirtatiously with a group of girls, one of whom has her hand on his arm. At dinner that night, Cory is upset with Meg for not following his directions, and she plays jealous because she knows it makes him like her more.

When Cory is out, Meg continues to root through his life. She learns how much his house costs, how he has $30,000 in a bank account, and that he doesn’t keep his computer unlocked. She also finds a document labeled Northside, containing agreement papers on his exit from his previous school after an affair with a student. In exchange for going to therapy, he could work at another school, the one where he is now principal.

Kat’s boss, Frank, wants her to comb through all the Northside High yearbooks to find any details she can about Cory Dempsey, and she’s frustrated with the grunt work she’s given when she has a more viable lead. She reveals that her mother had to give up her career with the Washington Post to give birth to Kat, and Kat had to give up her desire to pursue fiction in exchange for a more practical career in journalism. She finds photographs of the students involved, Kristen Gentry, Laura Lazar, and Meg Williams. She reaches out to Laura, hoping she can help bridge the link to Meg Williams.

Kat meets Laura on Laura’s lunch break and chats with her under the condition that they won’t talk about Kristen. She reveals what she knows about Meg, and eventually, Laura agrees to share what happened between Kristen and Cory off-the-record. Cory charmed Kristen with little gifts and then doted on her until he forced her into sexual acts and eventually got her pregnant. Kristen’s parents were entirely uninvolved and just wanted to keep the story quiet to maintain appearances. Ultimately, Kristen had an abortion, got her GED, and didn’t fulfill her dream of becoming a doctor because she was so shattered by what happened to her. Laura has guilt about not speaking out and protecting Kristen, but Kat defends her for being young and says that they can be stronger next time, because there’s no shortage of bad men like Cory Dempsey.

Meg was preparing to leave, but she couldn’t because she had to get justice for Kristen after how kind Kristen was to her. Meg vows to make Cory pay for everything Kristen suffered. Meg has a really hard time letting Cory touch her after knowing what he’s done, but the thought of getting revenge makes it bearable. Meg takes Cory for a ride financially, starting with a computer. She pretends to look at computers on Craigslist, and by playing the naive, want-to-be-self-sufficient, clueless young girl, she cons Cory into buying her a new $3,000 MacBook Pro, insinuating she can repay him with sexual acts.

Nate comes over to go out with Cory, and he again demonstrates how skeptical he is of Meg and tries to warn Cory about buying her such expensive things. Cory waves it off, suggesting Meg is so simple that it’s fine. Meg continues to try to set traps to get Cory to buy her things until she figures out what works. She also stumbles on photographs he has of him and Kristen. She eventually gets him to agree to let her buy the groceries, so she can pitch in and he doesn’t have to go to the store after work. She buys standard, cheaper food that he hates until he caves and gives her access to his bank card and gets her added as a user on it. He complains about all the emails he gets, so she has his email notifications from his bank account switched off altogether.

Kat reveals how she met Meg Williams, even though she didn’t know it was Meg at the time. Kat finds out about Cory’s best friend, Nate Burgess, from an anonymous call to her workplace. Upon the advice of the caller, she goes to the bar Nate frequents and cons him into talking to her about Cory. She has to get to the school for an interview for her boss, but she figures she has enough time and acts in the way she thinks is most important for the story. Nate flirts with her and offers to tell her about Cory if she has another drink. She does and wakes up in his apartment the next day with a pounding head and feeling sick. Nate slept with her and alleges she consented, but Kat can’t remember anything about what happened after that last second of him offering to share details with her over another drink. She realizes she was raped. Rather than go get a rape kit or tell the police, she tries to salvage her job and heads to Northside High to do what she was supposed to do for her boss.

At first, Meg annoys Cory with transparency, telling him everything she buys with the amount and a receipt. He tells her he doesn’t want to hear about it, so she is able to start testing the limits of his monitoring. She also sells her mother’s van to a mother with kids for $6,000 cash and deposits $500 into Cory’s account. She pretends her car broke down, and she couldn’t afford to have it repaired, so they gave her $500 for it. Cory offers to buy her another car, for which Meg tricks the owners into putting the title in her name. This breaches Cory’s limits, and Meg promises to switch it over to him. She doctors changing the title over, but in doing so, she finds emails between him and a student, Stacy, that escalate inappropriately.

Meanwhile, Nate has hired a private investigator and found out that Meg has lied about everything. He confronts her at Cory’s house, and Meg runs out to the elderly neighbor screaming that Nate tried to assault her. Meg lies to Cory about what happened, and after a while, Cory believes her. He cuts Nate off, and she prepares to finish her plan of slowly leeching money from his savings. It takes a long time, and Meg must cut off her best friend, Cal, completely, to save her cover and start a new life.

When the time is right, Meg prints everything and prepares three copies: for the newspaper, his rival colleague at school, and the school board. Meg accompanies Cory to school and plants the photos of him and Kristen in his desk. She pretends to run errands and sets Nate up by calling the LA Times with a tip about him. She then takes the money and the new car and leaves, but instead of going far away and starting over like she dreamed, she drives to the house Ron Ashton stole from her mother. She blends in much more now, with the expensive clothes she’s wearing and the new car. She doesn’t know when she’ll be ready to take down Ron Ashton, but she feels Cory’s demise is a good steppingstone and knows she will eventually get there.