Secrets and Lies

Secrets and Lies
Jaishree Misra

The Secret History meets Daddy’s Girls as four old schoolfriends reunite after fifteen years in this sizzling blockbuster.You can't run away from your past…Anita, Zeba, Bubbles and Sam have a friendship that spans 20 years - a friendship born out of their years at a private girls’ school in Delhi in the early Nineties. Beautiful, intelligent and secretive, they were the top clique; the girls that everyone wanted to impress - until the arrival of a newcomer to the school. 15-year-old Lily D'Souza is beautiful, gifted and acerbic and instantly threatens their superiority.Now, Anita, Sam and Bubbles live in London. Bubbles is the pampered but bored wife of a billionaire, Anita is a top journalist working for the BBC, whilst Sam tries hard to be a trophy wife for her corporate lawyer husband. Zeba remained in India, and now lives a life of unimaginable luxury as the world's reigning Bollywood queen.Called back to India for a reunion by their beloved school principal Mrs Lamb, the women must confront a secret that has haunted their adult lives. Lily's body was found on the night of their school prom and, for twenty years, the open verdict has shielded the fact that they may have had a hand in her death.But as they reunite in Delhi to find out the truth about what really happened that night, will their friendship stand the strain? Or are some things better left unsaid…?

JAISHREE MISRA

Secrets and Lies

Copyright (#u6f123e10-61fe-513d-9b8c-334c40763cd0)

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

AVON

A division of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

Copyright © Jaishree Misra 2009

Jaishree Misra asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9781847561688

Ebook Edition © 2009 ISBN: 9780007331642

Version: 2018-06-18

This book is dedicated to all my girlfriends, but most

especially Qubra, who never minded that I regularly

swiped her lunch back at school…

With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipt maiden And many a lightfoot lad. By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot lads are laid; The rose-lipt girls are sleeping In fields where roses fade.

A.E. Housman

Contents

Title Page (#u6d94d893-487f-5810-8965-ca13e472da29)

Copyright (#udb3b7d5c-39f3-55b1-9da2-0d3ef9671925)

Prologue (#u1ff02072-9d1e-574c-8ac3-381e55577a81)

Chapter One (#u7a139143-9a5d-54fc-bafb-a67d3e9f04ab)

Chapter Two (#u69246991-304c-59e4-834a-791e92f9e20d)

Chapter Three (#ud543ba77-9251-5566-9713-de745ae7f5ac)

Chapter Four (#u7904e05f-69dc-517b-96c3-54119906be7b)

Chapter Five (#u7a1ca08e-dca3-523d-86c5-ab0ccb969a32)

Chapter Six (#udf96b16c-1773-54f0-bb58-6e0cd0716bd8)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)