“You’re not going to murder me in the night, are you?” Emily asks.

“Hahaha. That’s funny,” I say.

Of course, I’m not going to murder her in the night. I need my laptop back first. That’s the whole point of making friends with Emily Harper, author of the hugely successful novel Diary of an Octopus. So I could get into her apartment and take back what’s mine.

Emily doesn’t know who I really am. She thinks I’m her biggest fan, her new best friend who happens to need a place to stay for a few days. She doesn’t realize the laptop she found—and took—from a busy airport almost two years ago was mine.

I don’t care about the laptop, just what’s on it: my diary.

I kept it many years ago as a troubled thirteen-year-old girl with a vivid imagination and a flair for the dramatic. Now she’s published it as her own.

She thinks it’s a story about a schoolgirl’s crush on her teacher, but she’s wrong. It’s a story about a murder. Two murders, if you count the hamster.

She thought it was okay to make a few changes and publish it under her own name, but she was wrong about that too.

Because, sometimes, truth is deadlier than fiction.