Page 73 of The Followers

Molly settled cross-legged on the floor, her heart beating a furious rhythm, and opened the leather notebook. Each page contained three columns of numbers written in Scott’s careful handwriting. The far left-hand column were dates starting a few months after Kristina Casillas’s murder. The middle column was a series of dollar amounts, with an entry for nearly every month for the past nine years in varying amounts: sometimes only $10, sometimes $1,000, and most recently $5,000. The far right-hand column looked like a running total of the middle column. At the top of each page he’d written, in large blocky letters: Total owed - $193,450.

She couldn’t make sense of this, so she turned to the spiral-bound notebooks. They were the cheap kind you might pick up at a drugstore, the edges frayed and worn with use. She recognized Scott’s handwriting again, this time in paragraph form, covering the pages from top to bottom in his neat script.

She paused in the middle of a page and read:

I have gazed too long into the abyss. It not only gazes back at me, it threatens to swallow me.

A chill ran down her spine. She flipped to the next page, and read at random:

If I am to become a monster, at least let it be in the process of fighting a monster. Or is it preferable to disappear? To un-create myself, to return to the dust, to escape the confines of guilt and ease into nothingness.

It continued like that, stream-of-consciousness, often making little sense, his handwriting slanting down the pages as if he couldn’t write fast enough to keep up with the feverish churning of his brain. It was difficult to believe Scott had written this, these words so different from the way he spoke, but it was his handwriting.

She picked up a new notebook and opened the front cover, read aloud in a shaky voice:

“If I could go back—undo it all—would one crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds? The capability of killing will live within me forever now.”

His handwriting became unreadable then, and she flipped to the next page with shaking hands.

“To take a life,” she read, her voice just above a whisper. “To snuff it like a candle. To render another human being extinct. No forgiveness, no— How is it possible to continue?”

Maybe he meant taking a life as in taking Ella away from her prior life. She wanted to believe that. She didn’t want to believe what she was actually reading, these barely coherent ramblings of a guilty conscience. Her eyes burned with tears. Her chest burned with anger.

She slammed down the notebook and picked up the plastic bag holding the necklace. She imagined Kristina Casillas wearing it, remembered the news articles about her death, the signs of attempted strangulation. The clasp of the necklace was broken, and Molly hated the images rushing into her mind: Scott with his hands around a delicate, pale neck, Scott yanking the necklace off, breaking the clasp, Scott’s fists battering and bruising, throwing a slim, young body against a wall.

She didn’t know she was crying until tears fell on the floor, dust pooling around each individual droplet. With a start, she realized it was getting late. Scott would be home soon.

Her mind raced. She’d drive to Liv’s house, pick up the girls, and head somewhere he couldn’t find them. Just for a night or two, to give herself time to think. Rubbing her face with her hands, smearing tears and sweat, she prepared to leave.

“Molly?” Scott stood in the doorway of the Westfalia, bending at the waist to see inside. “What are you doing?”

thirty-eight

A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.... That’s what real love amounts to—letting a person be what he really is.

—Jim Morrison quote pinned to Molly’s

Pinterest board “Words to Live By”

After two hours with Chloe and Ella, Liv was out of ideas. She had a newfound respect for Molly, entertaining them all day, every day. Chloe was delightful, but truly the cutest walking disaster Liv had ever met. She’d already gotten into Liv’s makeup and dumped out an entire bag of cereal. After that, they’d walked to the pond near the apartment complex, skipped rocks, and fed the ducks. Finally Liv, in a stroke of desperation, asked the girls if they wanted to make chocolate chip cookies, because that’s what Kristina used to do with Liv and Oliver when she’d babysat them. Both girls had cheered.

Now Chloe was sitting on Liv’s counter, her pink sundress covered in flour and her face sticky with dough, while Ella and Liv spooned the dough into balls.

“This is fun,” Ella said, smiling, as she plopped a misshapen ball of cookie dough onto the cookie sheet.

“I’m glad you came over,” Liv said. “I don’t have any little sisters, so it’s nice to hang out with you.”

Ella nodded gravely. “Do you have any brothers?”

“Yes, I have one.” Liv handed the beaters to Chloe to lick. “He’s named Oliver. I called him Ollie when we were growing up.”

“Ollie-wollie-pollie-mollie,” Chloe said in a sing-song voice. “Hey! Ollie sounds like Molly! That’s my mommy’s awesome name.”

On a whim, Liv told the girls to smile and snapped a picture of them. She sent it to Oliver, wanting him to understand, at least a little bit, what it was like to be with Ella.

Oliver’s reply came immediately:

How did you get this?

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