The Last Illusion of Paige White
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If I’m stuck between worlds, maybe it’s because I lied to myself in the last one.
Paige White’s life looks flawless—sepia-tinted breakfasts by the lake with her daughter, sun-drenched picnics with her husband, cozy vans and curated captions from a postcard town in Australia. Thousands scroll for the comfort of her perfection.
Then a single, jarring image appears on Paige’s feed: she’s soaked, hollow-eyed, and not smiling. Days later, she’s found drowned.
Jane Masters—Paige’s childhood best friend, now a Sydney journalist—returns for the funeral planning to leave as quickly as she came. But the lake town she fled has a way of swallowing things: truths, loyalties, the last days of a woman who lived on camera. As Jane digs into Paige’s carefully edited life, she meets a community fluent in omissions and a family that doesn’t fit the frame.
Told in tandem with Paige’s clear-eyed reflections from the in-between, The Last Illusion of Paige White is a sharp, introspective mystery about friendship, performance, and the stories we sell—online and to ourselves. It will leave you questioning what’s real, what’s staged, and what we owe the dead when the filter finally drops.