The Five Year Lie

Drew/Jay is both the love interest and the cause of the inciting incident of the novel. Five years before the start of the novel’s present timeline, Jay’s investigation into the Cafferty family’s company Chime Co. leads to his disappearance, ending his blossoming romance with Ariel—which in itself is complicated by Jay’s disguise as Drew. Jay remains in hiding for years, unaware that he and Ariel have a son and unable to contact her despite wanting to do so. When Ariel receives a previously undelivered text from Drew/Jay, she launches her own search into what happened to the man of her dreams.

As the novel progresses, readers learn through chapters written from Jay’s point of view that he is less untrustworthy dark antihero and more upstanding love interest. His transgressions have good reasons. Hacking through Chime Co.’s security protocols to get to sensitive data was a means to get justice for the victims of police misuse of private security footage, illustrating The Impact of Technology on Personal Lives. Meanwhile, lying to Ariel was intended to keep her safe from her villainous uncle Ray. As a romantic lead, Jay is sensitive and vulnerable; he is a heroic veteran who got injured saving a child and has insecurities about his leg prosthesis. He immediately accepts fatherhood and recommits to Ariel as soon as they are reunited.

Both domestic thrillers and romances include the trope of the unwavering ally and best friend: someone for protagonists to confide in. The protagonist in the thriller often needs a knowledgeable ally to provide expertise and information. In the romance, they need a best friend to provide encouragement and help the protagonist process information about the relationship. In this novel, Zain and Larri fulfill these roles for Ariel during her investigation into her boyfriend Drew/Jay’s disappearance.

Zain is Ariel’s main detecting helper. His role as a programmer inside Chime Co. enables him to direct Ariel toward accessing information and then interpret what she finds, which often needs some technological know-how. Although Zain is set up as a possible antagonist at first since it is unclear why he is helping Ariel and who the devious Brainz is, Zain’s confession that he had a crush on Drew/Jay allows the novel to sidestep the question of motivation. However, Zain’s LGBTQ+ identity and off-page death are problematic: He is a gay man with no interests or personal life outside of Ariel’s story, and his killing falls into the “Bury Your Gays” trope, in which LGBTQ+ side characters exist only to support heterosexual protagonists and are considered expendable when a novel needs to raise stakes.

Larri helps Ariel process her feelings about the missing Drew/Jay and their relationship. Her wise-cracking persona and straightforward way of speaking allow the novel to cut some of the tension for more lighthearted scenes. At the same time, Larri’s relationship with Tara, which is strained because of misleading footage from their security camera, illustrates how long-term couples can weather issues of trust and resentment. Larri becomes Ariel’s main model for a healthy romantic relationship, as her own parents were in a dysfunctional and abusive one.