Excerpt from Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Keep your friends close, but keep your enemies closer, even if you have to become just like them. As a child, whenever I had to take car trips with X, it was safer to sit directly behind him because he couldn't hit me without having to pull over and haul me out. Sitting there, I felt like his lesser shadow. I couldn't read a book because it made me carsick, so I spent the time memorizing the back of the head I hated most. If the car came to a sudden stop, I pitched forward until I could smell the dead-skin stench of his hair, terrified I might somehow merge right into his body.

Imitation isn't flattery—it's protection. There's a class of animals called "mimics" who pretend to be other kinds of animals, to avoid becoming the delicious prey they indeed are. The powdery gray owl butterfly bears a convincing owl-eye spot on each wing, guarding it from bird attack. The harmless milk snake imitates venomous copperheads and coral snakes, with bright red-orange bands to warn off predators. Their lies are their hides. Tear a mimic free from her disguise and you'll find only inner flesh, viscera, a heart emptying its last blood into the dirt. She will die, and be eaten.

Unless she learns how to rip off your disguise first.

* * *

In the fall of 2002, I was living in the Front Range foothills of the Colorado Rocky Mountains, in a small city that hosted a university and a swarm of tech startups. I met an attorney in a bookstore there because we were both reaching for the same Paul Auster novel. We withdrew, laughed, chatted briefly about the author and books, and then he started telling me about his life. He wasn't complaining, just reporting. "I'm a partner in the kind of law firm I've always dreamed of. But I'm beginning to hate it."

The man looked like a lawyer. He was about twenty years older than me, my height, in a cornflower-blue button-down shirt that matched his eyes so exactly he must have bought it for that purpose. But his hunched shoulders betrayed misery, and his arms flapped at his sides like he had no use for them anymore but didn't know how to shed them. The man said, "Or maybe I'm just sick of it. My job. My life. I don't know if what I'm doing has any meaning anymore. I'm thinking about leaving my law firm. Maybe even leaving the practice of law altogether."

Then he stopped, shocked. "Wait."

"What?"

"I've never told anybody this stuff."

"It's okay," I said.

But he scanned the stacks, unable to meet my gaze, and his voice cracked. "What did you do? What's happening?"

"Don't worry. People tell me secrets all the time."

"I don't. I don't even know who you are." He jabbed an index finger in the air between us. "My partners can't know. This is confidential stuff."

"I won't tell anyone." He still looked upset, so I said, "It's not you. It's just my face. It does that. People tell me things. I'm sorry."

"People tell you things like this?" The man's expression slowly changed as he regarded me, as if I had suddenly gone on clearance. Then he said, "Come work for me!"

"What?"

"I'm offering you a job." He now looked relaxed, expansive. He leaned back against the books in the B section.

"What kind of job?" I asked. I was afraid he was about to say something dirty.

But instead he said, "You could investigate my lawsuits for me. PI work. Talk to witnesses. Get them to open up."

The idea was amazing, getting paid money for what usually ended up happening anyway. The man told me his name, Grayson. He said, "If you got that stuff out of me, you can get anything out of anyone." Then he named a generous hourly rate, five times what I was earning as a temp for a pharmaceutical company.

At that point in my life I was destitute, despite the fact that I had "made it." I was a thirty-three-year-old fiction writer. The year before I met this man, I'd had a short story published in The New Yorker. My collection of stories had come out with a major New York publisher. My book won a prize Toni Morrison had won ten years before.

Excerpted from Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse. Copyright © 2022 by Erika Krouse. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.