Page 31 of By the Time You Read This

Do you hate me yet?

Should it matter if you do?

I’m still a person who lost her father.

My mother wouldn’t eat the salmon or lobster or steak. I’d never thought my parents’ marriage was a love match, but the death along with the loss of her lifestyle hit my mother hard.

Three months after my father’s death, my mother took a bottle of some kind of pills liberally prescribed to her by a doctor too greedy to say no, and then never woke up.

I had lots of casseroles then.

That time, I tried to eat them.

I fired the maid, which was probably not a smart thing to do considering I’d never learned to cook in my life. But I survived off those casseroles—and take-out, I’m not a martyr here.

I ate those casseroles and tried to believe that they were worth waking up for every day.

Spoiler alert, they weren’t. They were terrible.

I thought about making an appointment with that doctor who would still have prescribed me a lethal dose of something even though my parents had both just killed themselves.

I had my phone in my hands, ready to do it.

And then came a knock, just like so many others in the days before it. I couldn’t stomach one more casserole.

But I answered the door, because if I didn’t one of the ladies who brought the casseroles would probably call the cops.

Everyone knew I was hanging on by a thread.

It wasn’t one of my neighbors at my door, though.

Instead it was a girl. She asked, “Do you know who killed your father?”

And that’s when I found something besides the casseroles to make each day worth waking up for.

Chapter Eleven

Raisa

Day One

Gabriela Cruz lived in a pretty, well-maintained duplex about a ten-minute drive from the harbor that was much nicer than anything Raisa had lived in at twenty-two. The address had been listed in a trespassing arrest against Gabriela, and Raisa did wonder for a minute if she’d given the police wrong information.

But Gabriela answered only a few seconds after they knocked.

Her eyes slid over them before narrowing into a glare. “I know my rights.”

Then she slammed the door.

Raisa and Kilkenny exchanged amused glances. Some agents didn’t like the fact that this new, more online generation did things like this, but Raisa appreciated that people were learning more about protections granted to them by law.

Still, that didn’t mean she couldn’t try to convince Gabriela to talk to them.

“We just have a few questions about Isabel Parker.”

A beat passed, but then, slowly, the door opened. “Will you tell me what really happened to her?”

Gabriela was all eyes and lashes, as if her face had been created by a Disney animation artist.

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