Page 10 of By the Time You Read This

“Doing what Isabel wants,” Kilkenny said, neutrally again.

“You have a better idea?”

“No, I just want to make sure. Do you want to do this?” he asked quietly. Seriously. “We don’t have to say anything to anyone. We can just pretend you never got this letter. No one else has to know.”

The thought hadn’t even occurred to her, but she knew the answer immediately. After Raisa had found out who her biological family was, had found out what kind of darkness ran in their blood, she had been thrown off balance for a while, worried that perhaps her moral compass wasn’t infallible, either. But she’d also realized how much power that gave her—to wake up every day and make a choice that she would uphold justice, she would do what was right when she could, and she would never become complacent about her own choices.

If someone had killed Isabel—or paid to have her killed, really—they deserved to be held accountable for their crime, whether Isabel technically deserved justice or not. When you started making exceptions to who was protected under the law, you got into slippery areas that never seemed to end well.

Maybe in a perfect world, Raisa wouldn’t have to be the one to solve the crime. In a perfect world, she’d hand over her information to the local detectives and wish them luck.

This wasn’t the perfect world, it was just theirs, and Raisa would do what she had to do to make sure Isabel didn’t ruin that from the grave.

“I need to find whoever did this,” Raisa finally said and Kilkenny didn’t look even a little bit surprised.

“I wanted to make sure you realized you had the choice.”

Raisa laughed at that, and he shook his head, still earnest.

“Hey,” he said, waiting until she met his eyes. “You have a choice. No matter what Isabel wanted, no matter what tricks she set in motion before she died. You can just walk away.”

“And go do what? Take a vacation where shirtless men serve me pretty drinks and I sit by the pool all day?” Raisa asked, and let herself imagine it.

“Would that be so terrible?” Kilkenny asked. “Our demons feel inevitable until we simply turn our backs on them.”

Raisa swallowed her first—sarcastic—reply, the one that came from the girl who’d survived her teenage years in a shitty foster care system and emerged as one of the country’s top forensic linguistic experts.

It might have come out something like,How much do you charge for that insightful advice, doc?And that wasn’t fair to Kilkenny.

Instead, she went with honesty, making herself vulnerable to one of the few people she trusted not to make her pay for that. “Don’t you see? The fact that I have a choice is why it’s so important that I do it.”

Transcript fromIsabel Parker: The Girl Next DoorPodcast

Melody Stevens:Hey, hey, murder-fiends! I think you’re going to adore this episode—it has everything you guys love, love, love. Abuse, triple homicide, a family torn apart. Secrets. An FBI agent and her hunky partner. Yes, yes, yes, you heard that right. So buckle up while I take you back to the teeny, tiny town of Everly, Washington.

The year is 1998. It was a hot summer day when the three Parker sisters came home to their parents, Tim and Rebecca “Becks” Parker, murdered in their bed. Let’s just say the scene was ...notpretty. We’re talking over forty stab wounds here.

The culprit?

Alex Parker, the only boy of the four siblings and the oldest at that. He was found dead in the parents’ bathtub—claw-foot, I checked—with a note beside him confessing to the murder-suicide.

Easy-peasy for the local cops, huh?

Hold. The. Phone.

The real story is even messier than that.

But first, let me introduce you to the girls at the heart of this narrative. The three sisters.

Larissa Parker is our baby. She was only three years old when her parents were killed. She’ll play a bigger role later, so remember her.

Next is Lana Parker. The middle child, age twelve at the time of the deaths. She was smart, so smart, and also a bit of an odd duckling, bless her. That wasn’t anything notable in a family of math geniuses—I’m not using that word as hyperbole, either, folks. The parents were world-renowned.

And then there was Isabel Parker. The oldest at fifteen.

She viewed herself as the other girls’ protector, their big sister. She was the shield between them and Alex Parker, who reportedly had signs of his father’s schizophrenia and a vicious temper peeking through.

From all accounts Tim and Becks Parker were neglectful parents, not so much hateful or abusive, but too wrapped up in each other and their careers to ever have time for their children.

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