46 pages • 1 hour read
First Lie Wins
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Interlude 4-Chapter 18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Interlude 4 Summary: “Alias: Mia Bianchi—Six Years Ago”
Mr. Smith assigns Lucca the alias Mia Bianchi and instructs Mia to infiltrate the campaign of a rising political star, Andrew Marshall. Mr. Smith has instructed her to get blackmail-worthy material on Marshall. This increasingly concerns Mia as she learns that Marshall is a boring, clean-cut man. Without Mr. Smith’s knowledge, she enlists the help of a man named Devon to deal with any issues that arise if the Marshall job goes wrong. While she’s with Marshall at a legal conference in Hilton Head, Mia receives instructions from Matt that she’s to get Marshall drunk and get him to have sex with a sex worker. Matt has bugged Marshall’s room and will record the encounter. Mia knows this plan will be unsuccessful because of Marshall’s personality, so she sets a plan of her own in motion. She invites a group of powerful men—congressmen, lawyers, and judges—to an informal meeting in Marshall’s room. The men, eager to ingratiate themselves with a rising political talent, accept. Mia drugs Marshall to get him out of the room and then sends in a group of sex workers.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Present Day”
On the way back from James’s parents’ house, Evie reflects on what the death of the Lucca-imposter means. It might have just been an accident, or it could have been a way for Mr. Smith to craft the legal death of Evie’s true identity. Evie is unsure of why Mr. Smith would want this.
Evie later meets up with Devon and tells him everything that has happened, including the Lucca-imposter and telling the police about the existence of Evie Porter from Tuscaloosa. Devon is distressed by these developments and encourages Evie to bail on the job, but she refuses. Devon gives Evie a roster of the next shipments moving through Ryan’s shipping company so that she can deliver this to Mr. Smith. Though she doesn’t tell Devon, Evie plans to alter some of the information on the roster to mislead Mr. Smith and give Ryan’s company a chance at staying afloat.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Present Day”
Back at home, Evie prepares to send Ryan off to spend more time with James’s family. As he’s leaving, she receives a text from Devon informing her that she’s in immediate danger. The police arrive and inform Evie that she’s a material witness in the death of Amy Holder. This confuses Evie because Amy Holder was the mark for the earlier case that she didn’t complete to Mr. Smith’s satisfaction. She doesn’t understand how the police have connected her with Holder when she’s now using an entirely separate alias.
In custody, Evie requests Rachel as her lawyer. She tells Rachel that she’s been operating under various aliases, but doesn’t tell Rachel anything about Amy Holder or her job infiltrating Ryan’s life. Rachel tells Evie that she’s been digging into her background and shows her pictures of Evie from different times in her life when she was posing as different people. All of these photos, though, are now associated with the name Evie Porter. Evie surmises that Mr. Smith must be behind this, but she doesn’t understand why he would put so much effort into erasing her past identities and affixing her to Evie Porter. Evie asks Rachel to call in a favor from someone who was connected to the work Evie did at the Hilton Head conference. The favor gets her out of jail.
Interlude 5 Summary: “Lucca Marino—Six Years Ago”
After the conference at Hilton Head, Lucca, no longer on the job as Mia, drives to Matt’s office. Matt is enraged that she ditched his plan, but Lucca insists that he call Mr. Smith so she can explain herself. She tells Mr. Smith, in front of Matt, that Matt’s plan was poor and so she changed the mark. Instead of getting blackmail material on Marshall, she got material on Senator Nelson, who attended the function in Matt’s room. Nelson went back to his own room with one of the sex workers and Lucca has their encounter saved on a flash drive. Lucca tells Mr. Smith that she no longer wants Matt to act as an intermediary between them. Mr. Smith agrees to this stipulation and sends an enraged Matt from the room. Mr. Smith questions how Lucca was so quickly able to pivot on this job and whether or not she really failed to gain influence over Marshall. Lucca doesn’t tell Mr. Smith that all of the men who were in Marshall’s room that night are now indebted to her, and she can call in those favors at any time. Lucca explained to Marshall what happened and how she saved him from political embarrassment.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Present Day”
Ryan and Evie have a tense car ride home, in which both acknowledge that they’re keeping secrets but not divulging any. Back in her bedroom, Evie discovers proof that Mr. Smith has incriminating photos of her at the scene of Amy Holder’s death. Evie calls Mr. Smith and he accuses her of hiding materials retrieved from Holder before her death in a safety deposit box in Atlanta. Evie acknowledges that she does have such a deposit box, but it doesn’t contain what Mr. Smith thinks it does. Mr. Smith tells her that the Lucca-imposter’s death was not an accident and she’ll be met with a similar fate if she doesn’t meet his associate in Atlanta and hand over what she’s hiding. The call ends and Evie cries in the bathroom, where she’s comforted by Ryan.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Present Day”
Evie tells Rachel and Ryan that she’s going to Atlanta, and both insist on coming with her. Evie is able to stop Rachel from coming, but Ryan insists. Evie communicates with Devon, setting up a drop-off point with him. As she and Ryan drive to Atlanta she stops off at a gas station where she leaves Devon a note filling him in on everything that’s happened as well as the details of the plan she’s devising. Ryan and Evie drive in uneasy silence as Evie directs him to the meeting point with Mr. Smith’s associate.
Interlude 4-Chapter 18 Analysis
This section of the novel continues to build on Evie’s struggle with balancing the notion of a supportive family with her line of work, further developing the theme of Community as a Source of Power. In these chapters, Evie’s character develops through her increasing ability to build connections with others. She grows closer to Ryan and is drawn in by the vulnerability he shows at James’s death. She chooses to comfort Ryan even though “[t]hose few minutes may have cost [ Evie] a clean getaway” (163). Evie desperately wants to see herself as a supportive, loving partner, even in a relationship built on mutual lies. Her choice to delay her departure recalls her choice to call Greg Kingston: both are a compromise between her duty to her work and her devotion to the idea of loving familial bonds. This time, though, Evie fails to strike the perfect balance and faces the consequences for her delayed departure. This section of the novel increasingly develops the question of whether Evie will find a balance between an ideal family and her criminality, part of the novel’s complex treatment of Duty and Decency.
Elston continues to raise tension as the novel approaches its climax. When Evie is taken in by the police, she tells Rachel to make a call. At this point in the narrative, Evie doesn’t divulge who she wants to call or how this person will be able to free her, so the reader feels the same incredulity that Rachel does when she responds, “You want me to call him and mention Hilton Head, June 2017, then what…?” (170). This withholding of necessary information creates suspense, but the relatively quick resolution of this mystery in the following interlude shows how the novel increasingly collapses the distance between the two plot times. As each timeline progresses, the knowledge gaps between them are reduced, creating a fuller picture of Evie as a coherent identity. The Malleability of Identity shifts to a means through which the reader understands Evie, rather than a barrier to understanding.
Elston creates a female protagonist who is aware of how she is sexualized by society and who seeks to reclaim this power for herself. Developing the transgressive ideas of the early passage when Evie often uses her sexual allure to distract Ryan, this section of the book shows that Evie is willing to use sex as currency. Evie salvages the botched Marshall job by using sex workers to compromise various politically powerful men in the room. This demonstrates that Evie understands how visibly sexualized bodies in American culture are objects of shame. She knows that she will wield power over the men whose sexual escapades she records because of the nature of this sexual shame. Although the men who make use of the sex workers are her marks, Evie is willing to make use of the bodies of other women. Her relationship to sexual autonomy is therefore morally ambiguous, especially as the sex workers and their motivations are not characterized by the novel, casting them as human tools through Evie’s eyes.
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