A Simple Favor

A Simple Favor Plot Summary

Introduction

The morning Stephanie Ward met Emily Nelson at the school pickup, she thought she'd found salvation—a glamorous friend who could rescue her from suburban loneliness. Standing under Emily's designer umbrella decorated with swimming cartoon ducks, watching their five-year-old sons run toward them with identical grins, Stephanie felt the hollow ache in her chest finally ease. She'd been drowning in isolation since her husband Davis died, desperately reaching out through her mommy blog to anyone who might understand the weight of single motherhood. Emily seemed like everything Stephanie wasn't: sophisticated, successful, effortlessly beautiful. She worked in fashion PR for Dennis Nylon, lived in a museum-perfect house, and moved through the world with the confidence of someone who'd never questioned her place in it. When Emily asked if Stephanie could do her "a simple favor"—watch her son Nicky for a few hours while she handled a work emergency—Stephanie said yes without hesitation. It felt like an honor, being trusted by someone so put-together. But when Emily failed to return that night, or the next, or the one after that, Stephanie's perfect friendship began to unravel into something far more sinister. In the suffocating quiet of Emily's absence, dark secrets would surface, revealing that nothing about their connection had been accidental—and that some favors come with a price too terrible to imagine.

Chapter 1: The Perfect Friendship: A Mommy Blogger Meets Her Match

The October rain drummed against Stephanie's windshield as she waited outside Warfield Elementary, watching other mothers huddle in their cars rather than risk their salon blowouts. She'd forgotten her umbrella again—another small failure in the endless catalog of maternal inadequacies she documented on her blog. At thirty-eight, she still felt like she was fumbling through motherhood, especially without Davis to steady her. Then she saw Emily Nelson standing beneath the oak tree where she always waited on Fridays, her umbrella a clear dome filled with cheerful yellow ducks that seemed to swim through liquid plastic. Emily's designer clothes were perfectly pressed despite the weather, her blonde hair untouched by humidity. She looked like she'd stepped from the pages of her own company's magazine. "Come here!" Emily called, waving Stephanie over with a diamond-and-sapphire ring that caught the gray light like captured fire. Under the umbrella's protection, Stephanie caught the scent of Emily's signature perfume—lilacs and lilies, she would later learn, made by Italian nuns and ordered from Florence. Everything about Emily suggested a more sophisticated world, one where women knew which perfumes to wear and how to make even school pickup look effortless. Their sons burst through the school doors together—Miles and Nicky, best friends who'd found each other without any parental engineering. Watching them laugh and shove each other playfully, Stephanie felt a familiar pang of guilt. Miles looked nothing like Davis, with his dark hair and angular features inherited from another father entirely. But Emily was studying the boys with genuine warmth, not the calculating assessment Stephanie had grown to expect from other mothers. "Why don't you come to our place?" Emily suggested as they walked toward their cars. "The boys can play, I can make hot chocolate. We could have wine." She paused, ring sparkling as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "My husband won't be home for hours—he's always at the office." Following Emily's sleek BMW through the winding roads to the Georgian colonial she called home, Stephanie felt like Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. The house was a masterpiece of mid-century modern design, filled with museum-quality furniture and artwork that Davis would have coveted. Above the fireplace hung a haunting black-and-white photograph of twin girls in party dresses, their faces eerily beautiful and knowing. As Emily poured wine and the boys disappeared to play, Stephanie found herself confessing things she'd never told anyone—about Davis's death, about her loneliness, about the weight of secrets she carried. Emily listened with perfect attention, occasionally reaching out to touch Stephanie's hand or refill her glass. When tears came, Emily cried too, her sympathy so immediate and genuine that Stephanie felt truly seen for the first time in years.

Chapter 2: A Simple Favor: When Trust Leads to Disappearance

Five months into their friendship, Emily's voice on the phone carried an edge of desperation Stephanie had never heard before. It was early morning, and Sean was somewhere over the Atlantic, flying to London for business meetings that would keep him away for days. "Please, Stephanie, I need your help," Emily said, her words rushing together. "There's an emergency at work—Dennis is having another meltdown, and I have to stay late to handle the damage control. Could you get Nicky at school? I'll pick him up by nine at the latest." Stephanie agreed without hesitation. It was just another simple favor, the kind mothers did for each other constantly. She picked up both boys, fed them dinner, let them build elaborate Lego constructions while she half-watched from the kitchen. When nine o'clock came and went with no word from Emily, she felt the first flutter of concern. By ten, she was texting. By eleven, calling. Emily's phone went straight to voicemail, her professional voice cheerfully promising to return calls soon. Stephanie tried the house phone—no answer. She checked Emily's company website, scrolled through her Instagram feed for any sign of where she might be. Nothing. The night stretched endlessly. Stephanie put both boys to bed in Miles's room, inventing explanations for why Nicky's mother hadn't come home. Maybe her phone died. Maybe the work crisis was bigger than expected. Maybe she was stuck in traffic, or her train was delayed. Each excuse felt thinner than the last. When Sean called from London the next morning, groggy with jet lag and alcohol, his confusion seemed genuine. Emily was traveling for business, he said—a few days on the West Coast. He sounded irritated to be woken, dismissive of Stephanie's concerns. Only after she hung up did she realize he hadn't asked about Nicky, hadn't seemed worried about his wife's whereabouts. The second night passed without word. The third. Stephanie called Emily's office, spoke to her assistant Valerie, who claimed Emily had stepped out momentarily. No one called back. The police, when Sean finally contacted them after returning from London, treated the case with bureaucratic indifference. Wives left all the time, they explained. Usually they came back. But Stephanie knew Emily would never abandon Nicky. The woman who texted constantly during work trips, who raced through yellow lights to avoid being five minutes late for pickup, who made faces at her son through the rearview mirror during their Friday afternoon adventures—that woman didn't simply vanish. As the days accumulated into weeks, Stephanie began her desperate campaign through her blog, pleading with her readers to watch for a beautiful blonde woman who might be lost or hurt or worse.

Chapter 3: Secrets Beneath the Surface: Emily's Vanishing Act

The investigation moved with frustrating lethargy. Detectives Meany and Fortas seemed more interested in their phones than in finding Emily, conducting interviews with the bored efficiency of people filling out forms. They traced Emily's movements to JFK airport, where security cameras captured her kissing Sean goodbye before he boarded his London flight. She'd been booked on a flight to San Francisco but never checked in. Instead, Emily had rented a white Kia sedan, specifically requesting no GPS tracking. The rental agent remembered her determination about that detail, though it hadn't seemed unusual at the time. The corporate E-ZPass followed her progress west on the Pennsylvania Turnpike for two hundred miles before she disappeared into dead zones of smaller roads where surveillance was sparse and secrets could hide. The discovery of Emily's bank withdrawals painted a more complex picture. Two thousand dollars in cash, collected over several days from a teller rather than ATMs. The closed-circuit footage showed her alone at the window, calm and purposeful, not the panicked victim of kidnapping Stephanie had imagined. The money suggested planning, preparation for something longer than an overnight business trip. When the insurance policy surfaced—two million dollars payable to Sean—the investigation shifted tone entirely. Suddenly the grieving husband became a suspect, his alibi scrutinized with new intensity. The policy had been tucked into Sean's employment contract, a checkbox he'd marked for maximum coverage without much thought. Now it looked like motive for murder. Sean's London alibi proved airtight—hotel cameras, restaurant receipts, business meetings with timestamped emails. But the insurance investigators weren't satisfied. They knew the statistics: when a wife disappeared shortly after a large policy was purchased, the husband was usually involved. The fact that no body had been found only made them more suspicious. Stephanie watched Sean navigate the questioning with growing sympathy. She saw how the accusations wore him down, how he flinched when detectives implied he'd orchestrated his wife's disappearance. In their shared vigil over Nicky, she and Sean began to rely on each other more heavily. What started as practical cooperation—shared school pickup, joint dinners to keep the boys together—gradually became something deeper and more complicated. The sexual tension crept in slowly, born from proximity and shared grief. Stephanie would catch Sean watching her as she cooked dinner, his gaze lingering on her hands, her mouth. When he helped clean dishes afterward, their arms would brush in the steamy kitchen, windows fogged with vapor that seemed to cocoon them in private intimacy. Neither acknowledged what was building between them, but both felt it thrumming beneath every interaction.

Chapter 4: Grief and Betrayal: The Aftermath of Death

The call came on a gray March morning while Stephanie was making breakfast for the boys. Michigan State Police had found a badly decomposed body on the shore of a lake near Emily's family cabin. The remains were too deteriorated for visual identification, but Emily's diamond and sapphire ring—Sean's mother's ring—had been wedged onto a swollen finger that matched her physical description. Sean broke down sobbing when he told Stephanie, his British reserve finally cracking under the weight of loss. They held each other on the couch while upstairs the boys played obliviously, their laughter a cruel counterpoint to adult grief. DNA testing would confirm what the ring suggested: Emily Nelson was dead, had been dead for months while they waited and hoped and gradually betrayed her memory by falling in love. The toxicology report painted Emily's final hours in stark detail. Alcohol and prescription painkillers in fatal combination, liver damage suggesting long-term substance abuse that neither Sean nor Stephanie had suspected. The coroner ruled it accidental—a woman struggling with addiction had gone too far, walked into frigid water while impaired, and drowned. But Stephanie couldn't reconcile this version with the Emily she'd known. Yes, Emily had mentioned youthful experiments with drugs, but she'd seemed completely sober during their friendship. She drank wine at their Friday gatherings but never to excess, never with the desperate thirst of someone fighting addiction. The woman who'd recorded Stephanie's confession at the county fair, who'd calculated every detail of their friendship—that woman didn't seem capable of such self-destruction. Sean and Nicky scattered Emily's ashes in the woods behind their house, a Buddhist ritual Sean had researched online in his grief. Stephanie watched from her kitchen window as father and son performed this final goodbye, five-year-old Nicky asking where his mother's spirit was supposed to go in the windless afternoon air. The life insurance company initially balked at paying, suspicious of the timing and circumstances. But Sean's lawyers were persistent, the evidence ultimately supported accidental death, and eventually the check arrived. Two million dollars that felt less like windfall than blood money, compensation for a loss too great to calculate in mere currency. By then, Sean and Stephanie had moved beyond the boundaries of friendship. Their first kiss came during one of Nicky's screaming tantrums, when he'd collapsed on the floor demanding his mother while throwing plastic toys against the walls. Afterward, when both boys were finally asleep, Sean and Stephanie found themselves clinging to each other on the couch, desperate for comfort and connection. The kiss tasted of salt tears and wine, of shared sorrow that had fermented into something dangerously close to love.

Chapter 5: Twin Revelations: Unmasking the Ultimate Deception

Stephanie's trip to Detroit began with a birthday card that arrived addressed to Emily three months after her supposed death. The spidery handwriting in brown ink belonged to Emily's mother, the same formal script that had marked every birthday for years. Either the old woman's dementia had erased her daughter's death, or some maternal instinct insisted Emily was still alive. Mrs. Nelson's mansion in Bloomfield Hills reeked of faded grandeur and rose potpourri. The elderly woman who answered the door moved with careful precision, her white hair perfectly arranged, red lipstick expertly applied despite trembling hands. She led Stephanie to a formal living room dominated by an uncomfortable candy-striped sofa that belonged to another era. "Remind me who you are again?" Mrs. Nelson asked, settling into her chair with the deliberate movements of someone navigating between lucidity and confusion. When Stephanie mentioned being Emily's friend, the old woman's eyes sharpened with suspicious intelligence. "She never mentioned a Stephanie. I never heard anything about a Stephanie." The photo albums revealed Emily's deepest secret: every picture showed two identical girls. Two Emilys in gardens and on beaches, in front of Yosemite's famous sign, aging page by page through childhood and adolescence. They wore different clothes—Mrs. Nelson had never dressed them identically, she explained—but their faces were mirrors of each other, dark-eyed and blonde and heartbreakingly similar. "Emily was the dominant one," Mrs. Nelson said, pouring gin into a crystal glass with hands that steadied as alcohol entered her system. "Born first, walked first, talked first. Evelyn was always smaller, sadder. They had that twin telepathy people talk about—could communicate just by looking at each other. Made raising them impossible." The story emerged in fragments between Mrs. Nelson's drinks. The girls' wild teenage years, their matching tattoos after a vicious fight, Evelyn's descent into serious addiction while Emily climbed toward success. They'd been estranged for years, Mrs. Nelson admitted, though she still sent birthday cards to both daughters. The last address she had for Evelyn was some seedy motel in Seattle. "Emily blamed me for Evelyn's problems," Mrs. Nelson continued, her voice taking on Emily's familiar edge. "But twins are born the way they are. Every parent knows that. Same DNA, different destinies." She raised her glass in a bitter toast. "Sometimes I can't tell which one I'm thinking about anymore." Driving back to Detroit Metro through potholed streets, Stephanie's mind raced through the implications. If Emily was a twin, if they shared identical DNA, then the body in Michigan's lake might not have been Emily at all. The missing tooth mentioned in the autopsy report, the liver damage from long-term substance abuse—these could belong to Evelyn, the troubled sister whose existence Emily had hidden from everyone who mattered. Back in Connecticut, Stephanie confronted Sean with her discovery. His shock seemed genuine—six years of marriage, and he'd never known his wife had a sister. But this revelation cast every mystery in new light. Emily's secretiveness, her periodic disappearances, the way she sometimes seemed to be listening for something just beyond hearing—all of it made terrible sense now.

Chapter 6: The Dead Return: Emily's Calculated Revenge

The phone call came while Stephanie was alone in the house, both boys at school and Sean in Manhattan. The caller ID showed "Out of Area," but the voice was unmistakably Emily's—warm, familiar, alive. "Stephanie, it's me." Stephanie's hands shook as Emily instructed her to go to the kitchen window and hold up two fingers. "Two," Emily said from wherever she was watching. "Try again." Seven fingers this time, counting both hands. "Lucky number seven. You always were a clever girl." The game was cruel and precise, designed to shatter any doubt about Emily's survival. She was out there, had been out there for months, watching as Stephanie moved into her house, slept with her husband, raised her son. The betrayal cut both ways—Emily for abandoning them, Stephanie for replacing her. "I want Nicky," Emily said during their second conversation, her voice carrying new hardness. "You can have everything else. The house, Sean, the insurance money. But I want my son back." She played the recording she'd made at the county fair, Stephanie's confession about Miles's true parentage crackling through the phone line. "Amazing what technology can do these days." The blackmail was elegant in its simplicity. Stephanie's deepest secret, the one that could destroy Miles's understanding of his own identity, was Emily's insurance policy. Any attempt to expose Emily's survival would trigger devastating consequences. Stephanie was trapped between loyalty to Sean and protection of her son, between justice and self-preservation. But when Emily called a third time, her tone had shifted from threatening to desperate. A man was following her—middle-aged, African American, always in suits and bow ties. He looked like a hit man from television, she said, and he'd been tracking her for weeks. Stephanie recognized the description immediately: Mr. Isaac Prager from Allied Insurance, the investigator who'd visited them months earlier. Emily's voice broke as she described her situation. She was hiding in a Danbury motel, afraid to stay in one place too long, running out of money and options. The careful orchestration of her disappearance was collapsing under the weight of bureaucratic persistence. Insurance fraud was a serious crime, and Prager seemed determined to uncover the truth. "I need to see you," Emily pleaded, tears audible in her voice. "I need a friend." Despite everything—the lies, the manipulation, the months of terror and grief—Stephanie agreed to meet. Emily was still her best friend, still the woman who'd cried over Stephanie's losses and shared wine on Friday afternoons. Whatever game Emily had been playing, whatever desperate circumstances had driven her to fake her own death, she needed help now. The Sheraton Hotel bar beside the interstate felt like a safe choice—public but anonymous, far from anyone who might recognize them. As Stephanie waited among fake books and artificial firelight, nursing potato skins and rehearsing what she wanted to say, she wondered if she was walking into another trap or finally getting answers to months of questions.

Chapter 7: Partners in Crime: Manipulation, Murder, and Motherhood

Emily arrived looking exactly as she had months earlier—professional, polished, devastatingly beautiful. But something was different beneath the surface, a brittleness that suggested recent trauma. When they embraced, Stephanie smelled the familiar perfume of lilacs and lilies, felt the sharp edges of Emily's ring pressing into her back. "I need you to understand," Emily said as they settled into their corner booth, her hands moving in the familiar gestures that made her jewelry catch the dim light. "Sean was abusive. Not physically—he was too smart for that. But psychologically, emotionally. He threatened to take Nicky if I ever left him, said his lawyers would destroy me in court using my history with substances." The story emerged between Emily's careful sips of margarita. Sean's manipulation had been subtle but relentless, designed to make Emily doubt her own perceptions and capabilities. The insurance scheme had been his idea, she claimed—a golden parachute for a career that was stalling, a way to disappear with enough money to start over somewhere his corporate connections couldn't reach them. "I had to leave Nicky with you because I was afraid," Emily continued, tears glistening in her dark eyes. "Sean would have killed me before he let me take Nicky away from him. Going into hiding was the only option I had." Stephanie wanted to believe, needed to believe that her friend was the victim rather than the architect of their shared suffering. Emily's explanation recontextualized months of confusion—Sean's occasional coldness, his reluctance to discuss Emily's disappearance, the way he'd seemed almost relieved when they finally received confirmation of her death. But the larger truth was more complex than simple abuse. Emily described her sister Evelyn's suicide with genuine grief, explaining how she'd rushed to Michigan too late to save her twin. The body in the lake was Evelyn's, but Emily had placed her own ring on her sister's finger—a final gift that had inadvertently provided perfect cover for her disappearance. "That insurance investigator, Prager—he knows too much," Emily said, checking her watch with nervous precision. "I'm meeting him in the parking lot in twenty minutes. Will you come with me? I need moral support." The favor seemed reasonable, even necessary. If Emily was going to confess to insurance fraud, she would need a character witness, someone to testify to Sean's controlling behavior and her desperate circumstances. Stephanie agreed, finishing her gin and tonic with hands that trembled slightly from alcohol and adrenaline. Outside, the afternoon air felt sharp and clean after the bar's artificial atmosphere. They walked across the asphalt toward Prager's familiar sedan, Emily pulling on gloves and adjusting a woolen hat that covered half her face. As they approached the car, Stephanie could see Prager's silhouette in the passenger seat, head tilted back as if sleeping. "He's not sleeping," Emily said quietly. "He's dead." The words didn't register immediately. Stephanie stared at Prager's peaceful expression, the complete absence of struggle or violence. Only when Emily explained—a hypodermic needle, pharmaceutical expertise gained during her wild years—did the reality penetrate. Her friend had committed murder with the casual efficiency of someone swatting a fly. "I need your help," Emily continued, her voice carrying the same tone she'd used when asking Stephanie to watch Nicky for an evening. "One last simple favor." The next hour passed like a fever dream. Following Emily's car along empty back roads, helping push Prager's sedan over a wooded ridge where it tumbled into flames far below—it felt like something happening to someone else, a movie Stephanie was watching rather than living. Emily's excitement was infectious, transformative. They were Thelma and Louise, bad girls writing their own rules. But driving home afterward, the reality settled like lead in Stephanie's stomach. She was now an accessory to murder, bound to Emily by shared criminality that made their previous secrets seem trivial. When Emily ordered her never to speak of what they'd done, to pretend it had never happened, Stephanie nodded numbly. Some favors, once granted, could never be taken back.

Summary

In the suffocating quiet that followed Prager's death, Stephanie returned to the rhythms of domestic life with a new understanding of how thin the membrane between ordinary existence and criminal chaos really was. She picked up the boys from school, cooked dinner, helped with homework, all while carrying the weight of what she'd done in Emily's service. The blog post she wrote afterward—about helping friends in desperate circumstances, about recognizing when someone's need is real—felt like a confession disguised as advice. Emily's revenge against Sean proved as calculated as everything else she'd orchestrated. Using Stephanie's blog as a weapon, she painted Sean as an abuser who'd driven both sisters to desperate measures. The viral post destroyed his reputation and career in one carefully crafted narrative, forcing him to flee to Ireland while Emily reclaimed her son and her life. By the time police found Prager's burned remains and the diamond ring that had belonged to Sean's mother, Stephanie had become the perfect fall guy—the desperate widow with obvious motive and Sean's hair conveniently planted in the wreckage. But Emily had always been playing a longer game than simple revenge or insurance fraud. She'd recognized in Stephanie a perfect accomplice: lonely enough to crave friendship, guilty enough to accept manipulation, weak enough to be controlled yet competent enough to be useful. Their relationship had never been accidental—Emily had selected her target as carefully as a predator choosing prey, grooming Stephanie through months of manufactured intimacy until she would do anything to preserve their bond. Now, with Sean destroyed and her own reputation rehabilitated, Emily disappeared into her new life with Nicky, leaving Stephanie to face the consequences of their shared crimes. In the end, some simple favors exact the ultimate price, and the fish always loses to the player who understands the game.

About Author

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Darcey Bell

Darcey Bell crafts intricate psychological thrillers that delve into the complex realms of secrets and interpersonal dynamics. She skillfully explores themes of lies, jealousy, and psychological abuse, often presenting these dark narratives from the perspectives of women in complicated relationships. Her debut novel, "A Simple Favor", not only achieved New York Times bestseller status but was also adapted into a successful film in 2018, illustrating her capacity to engage readers with addictive plots that blend mystery and suspense with humor and sharp character insights.\n\nIn addition to "A Simple Favor", Bell has penned other notable works such as "Something She's Not Telling Us" (2020), "All I Want" (2022), and "Woman of the Year" (2023), with a forthcoming title, "Another Simple Favor", anticipated in 2025. These books further cement her reputation as an author who captivates readers through intricate storytelling that prioritizes psychological complexity and vivid character voices. As a preschool teacher residing in Chicago, Bell's unique career path offers a compelling bio that highlights her dual roles in education and literature, suggesting that her professional experiences may inform the nuanced portrayals within her fiction.\n\nReaders who appreciate suspenseful, character-driven stories are likely to find Bell's books particularly engaging. Her ability to weave intricate plots with relatable human experiences ensures that her novels resonate with a broad audience seeking both entertainment and insight into the intricacies of human nature. While she has not received specific literary awards beyond bestseller recognition, her impact on the thriller genre remains significant, with her works continually drawing attention for their engaging narratives and compelling themes.

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