If You Tell: A True Story of Murder, Family Secrets, and the Unbreakable Bond of Sisterhood

“Enduring their mother was what bound them together. And while they might have had three different dads, they were always 100 percent sisters. Never half sisters. Their sisterhood was the one thing the Knotek girls could depend upon, and really, the only thing their mother couldn’t take away. It was what propelled them to survive.”

Olsen includes this passage in the Prologue to set the reader’s expectations for the book. Sisterhood, and the love that these sisters have for one another, is what keeps them alive. It also presents love as a feeling that Shelly cannot deprive them of and “couldn’t take away” (3). The writer thus reassures the reader not only that the girls survive, but that their relationships actually allowed them to escape their parents’ grasp.

“But to Lara, the kind of beauty Shelly possessed was like that of nightshade berries. They appear to be delicious but are actually dangerous.” 

Lara compares her stepdaughter to nightshade berries because she appears beautiful on the outside but is volatile, venomous, and uncontrollable on the inside. This is the first time in the book that Shelly is linked to poison, which ends up becoming one of the ways she manipulates and murders her victims.

“It was just before the move to Raymond. [Nikki] was asleep in her bed in the house behind the nursing home in Battle Ground. All of a sudden, she woke up, unable to breathe through a pillow pressed over her face. Nikki started screaming for her mother, and suddenly—as in that very instant—Shelly appeared […] The encounter stayed with Nikki. The speed with which her mother responded. The peculiar look on her face—more interested than concerned. Later, she would wonder if that was the first time her mother had messed with her mentally, and if she’d done the same thing to others in her life.” 

Nikki’s recollection of her strange encounter with her mother attempting to strange her is merely the first in a long line of abusive incidents. Olsen draws the reader’s attention to the idea that Shelly is “more interested than concerned” to make clear that Shelly takes pleasure in causing her daughter’s suffering. This passage also shows the reader how much Shelly enjoys being needed while simultaneously manipulating her victims to make them disbelieve what they just experienced.