Page 48 of By the Time You Read This

Emily Logan. The girl who had died just like Isabel and Delaney’s parents had. On a bed, stabbed too many times.

Psychologists had said that kind of homicide could only be driven by rage or a psychotic break. Yet with the Parkers, it had actually been Isabel’s cold calculation.

She’d wanted to mimic rage. She’d never actually experienced it herself.

Let’s play a game . . .

Delaney shook her head and left Emily in the past, bringing up Gabriela Cruz’s Flik page. Delaney had been a content moderator forthe video-based social media site for several years before Isabel made her triumphant return into her life via the app.

She knew it well.

Gabbi had established a following for herself in a particular corner of a very popular community. True crime girlies, she’d seen them called. Gabbi had also picked up a slice of the users who liked to advocate for better mental health treatment for women.

Delaney scrolled through her posts, searching for the start of the obsession.

Isabel Parker: Psychopath or Misunderstood Vigilante?

After that, there were a dozen or so other videos that focused on Isabel. Delaney made her way through them, coming to the conclusion that Gabbi idolized Isabel but didn’t want to, and the cognitive dissonance of connecting to something positive in a monster had caused her to break with reality a bit.

Delaney had seen it frequently in fandoms across popular culture. Bad behavior was explained away by the person’s fans; bad behavior was exaggerated by their haters. Being considered a “good” person who adhered to ever-narrowing and impossible social rules was the bare minimum expected for many celebrities these days.

The mental gymnastics that ensued if they stepped out of line would have been amusing to watch if Delaney didn’t find it so confounding. So many people seemed hell-bent on creating a religion, where they would be assigned to live out their days in heaven or hell based on their social media posting and nothing else.

Delaney wasn’t wired ... normally. She knew that. So she had never really worried about being thought of as a good person. She was just trying to make it through having helped more people than she’d hurt.

She returned to the last video Gabbi had posted about Isabel.

This one was simply titledWho Killed Emily Logan?

It had half a million views.

“Mind if I join you?”

This time Delaney was interrupted by a male voice. This time she didn’t flinch.

“Free country,” she said, without looking up. Still, she could see him from the corner of her eye. This was the fourth person to approach her unsolicited on this day when she knew she was being followed.

If she let her wilder conspiracy theories take root, she’d start to think everyone was in on the hunt.

That couldn’t be, though. This wasn’tThe Truman Show. Not every stranger was a threat.

Still, once was a coincidence and all that. So she killed the screen, holding the computer protectively on her lap as she stared at the night sky.

The man was thin, probably too thin, his face all sharp angles. His sandy hair was pulled back into a nub of a ponytail, and he wore beat-up leather sandals on surprisingly clean feet.

“Roan,” he said, when he caught her looking.

“Like the mountains in North Carolina?” she asked, and he grinned, revealing teeth too white and straight to fit the rest of him.

“My mother was a glassworker in Asheville when I was conceived,” Roan said, as confirmation.

That was certainly a thought-out fake name if it was indeed a fake name. Delaney closed her eyes, wondering if being paranoid was smart or dangerous.

The thing about being in fight-or-flight mode all the time was that it wore on the body; it wore on the mind. Her ability to make smart decisions was eroding because she saw every situation as full of threats.

But today, without initiating contact with any of them, she’d been approached by a homeless man, a beautiful woman, and then the very girl whom she’d gone to the bonfire to meet.

And now this, a man with a name too unique for it to work for undercover but also too strange and perfect for it to be real.

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