Page 33 of By the Time You Read This

Gabriela spit the other woman’s name like it was a sour thing in her mouth.

“Claiming Isabel had killed all these people she couldn’t have possibly killed,” Gabriela continued. “Just glance at the timeline once, and she’s absolved of most of the crimes people put on her résumé.”

There were moments even in this brief conversation that Raisa thought Gabriela understood the weight of everything Isabel had done, but then those were overturned by Gabriela equating Isabel’s victim list to a résumé.

She was young,she heard in Gabriela’s voice, and realized it could so easily be applied to this girl. Shewasyoung. She’d been through something extremely traumatic. Raisa felt for her, she did. But Gabriela was old enough to know better than this.

“They just wanted their five minutes of attention,” Gabriela continued on, blithely unaware of Raisa’s judgment. “Or in Essi’s case, two years of attention.”

“Are you saying you didn’t want to actually free Isabel?” Raisa asked.

“No, of course not—she killed people,” Gabriela said, everything about her earnest as hell.

“What was your goal, then?”

“I wanted her record cleared, and you know, Free Britney was so popular, it just kind of morphed into that.” Gabriela must have seen some confusion on Kilkenny’s face, because she explained directly to him, “Britney Spears was being held in a conservatorship where she pretty much couldn’t make any decisions on her own. Like, she had to ask her father to spend her own money, things like that. Her fans launched this movement to get her out of it, and it worked.”

Before either of them could say anything, Gabriela rushed to add, “I know it’s not the same thing. I know.”

“Then why did you keep using it?” Raisa couldn’t help but ask.

“Because it got attention?” Gabriela shrugged. “People had this view of Isabel that wasn’t true. They thought she was a psychopath, but they just didn’t understand her or the situation.”

“She was a psychopath.” This time it was Kilkenny who dropped the hammer. His voice, usually so neutral and diplomatic, had taken on a sharp edge. “One of her victims was a four-year-old girl whose head she smashed into a tree so that it looked like she died in an accident.”

Gabriela flushed pink, but it wasn’t with shame this time. “That’s a fake story.”

Raisa hated the wayfakecould be thrown around these days anytime someone was confronted with a fact they didn’t like.

“It happened,” Raisa said quietly. “There are pictures of the scene.”

Everything about Gabriela shut down, closed off. “What can I help you with?”

Raisa only half regretted pushing her to that point. She’d been defensive coming in, wanting to argue with them. There had beenno avoiding this, and Raisa wasn’t going to lie just to more easily get answers out of an interview subject.

Not about this.

“Did you have any contact with Ms. Parker?” Kilkenny asked.

“I wrote to her a few times,” Gabriela said, back to not looking at either of them.

Raisa stilled. “Did you sign the letters as ‘Your Biggest Fan’?”

“Ew, no,” Gabriela said, genuinely surprised and disgusted. “That’s so cringey.”

Right.“Okay, did you visit her?”

“Once,” Gabriela admitted.

“When was that?” Raisa asked.

“Like, a couple months ago?” Gabriela said. “I don’t know—time blends together. But it was kind of strange.”

“What was?”

“She didn’t ... she didn’t want to talk about anything, even though she was the one who’d invited me there,” Gabriela said, sounding a little pissed at Isabel for the first time. Maybe the hero worship had some cracks in the armor. “She only said one thing and then waited for the guards to come get her.”

“And that was?”

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