Verity

After discovering Verity's chilling autobiography manuscript, "So Be It," in which Verity confesses to resenting her daughters Chastin and Harper as rivals for Jeremy's love, to attempting to abort and later murder the twins as infants, and to deliberately capsizing the boat that killed Harper out of blame for Chastin's earlier death, Lowen becomes suspicious that Verity's comatose state following her car crash may be faked. She notices small, inexplicable movements from Verity and sets up a hidden camera in her room. The footage confirms Verity has been faking her incapacitation all along.

Lowen tells Jeremy what she's discovered. Enraged by his wife's manipulation and the horror of what he now believes she did to their daughters, Jeremy attempts to strangle Verity in a fit of fury. Lowen stops him, warning that visible strangulation marks would implicate him in a murder investigation. Instead, at Lowen's urging, Jeremy induces Verity to vomit and then suffocates her by covering her mouth and nose so her death appears to be accidental aspiration in her sleep. Verity dies, and Jeremy is not charged, since the death appears natural.

With Verity gone, Lowen and Jeremy openly commit to their relationship, and some time later she is pregnant with his child. In the final scene, the couple returns to the lake house to clear it out, and Lowen finds a handwritten letter from Verity to Jeremy hidden beneath the floorboards. The letter claims "So Be It" was a fictional narrative written in the voice of a villain, that Verity never harmed her children, and that the car crash was not her suicide attempt but an attack by Jeremy himself after he found the manuscript and tried to kill her. According to the letter, Verity survived unharmed but was too afraid to confront him, so she chose to feign brain damage while plotting to eventually escape with their son Crew.

Shaken by the possibility that she and Jeremy killed an innocent woman, Lowen destroys the letter before Jeremy ever sees it. She rationalizes that the letter itself could be one more manipulation from a woman who had proven herself a master of deception, and the book ends with Lowen unable to determine which version of Verity's story, if any, was the truth.