The Follower Kate Doughty (general ebook reader .txt) 📖

table, as if she’s impatient for something to happen. Cecily imagines that she’s eager to get back to interviewing real suspects, but when she asks about leads in Bella’s case, all Perry says is that she can’t disclose case details.

Bella’s funeral is the following Tuesday.

And Cecily—Cecily still feels raw. She is dreading it, but somehow the only thing worse than going would be not going. So later that week, she and the rest of her family don their funeral attire. Cecily debates about her bandages for a long, long time, but in the end decides to leave them be. She wears her hair down, but that doesn’t help much.

The sight of herself in the mirror almost makes her rethink her decision. She chokes, covers another sob, and prepares for a breakdown, but suddenly Amber is there.

“For Bella,” Amber says, putting a hand on her shoulder. Cecily nods, but it’s not until her mother offers her a short, black crow’s nest veil that she finally feels ready to leave the house. At least, as ready as she will ever be.

The service is beautiful, moving. Tragic. Cecily might have found some comfort in it if she didn’t feel like everyone was glaring at her and her family. Kids take sly photographs when they think that no one is looking; adults bow their heads to whisper. Cecily clenches her fists around the funeral program and tries to ignore them. Tries to think about anything other than the fact that these were Bella’s friends, family, neighbors. When the service ends, all she wants to do is sprint out of the church, but she forces herself to join her siblings as they walk toward Bella’s mother.

Mrs. DiNatori stands at the end of a line of mourners. Somehow, her grief makes her seem large and small at the same time.

They approach. Cecily swallows and tries to say something, anything. “Bella . . . she was such a good friend to me. I was lucky to have her.”

Mrs. DiNatori gives Cecily a sharp nod, her lips pressed together tightly—out of rage or the need to keep from crying, Cecily cannot tell.

She supposes that was the best she could have hoped for.

After the funeral, townspeople linger and talk, mourn, reminisce. None of them approach Cecily or her family. Finally, her parents seem to decide they’ve all had enough and they begin to make their exit—or at least, they try to. They’re halfway across the parking lot when someone calls after them.

“Aren’t you going to take a picture?” It’s one of Bella’s high school friends. Cecily tenses. Trent. She’d met him at the bonfire. He’d been so nice before.

“Yeah,” another girl says with a sneer. “Take a picture and post it online, I’m sure it’ll go viral. I’m sure that her mom won’t mind.”

“Ignore them,” Cecily’s mom says.

Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry, Cecily thinks.

“It’s your fault!”

The cry rings out through the lot, and Cecily freezes. She knows that voice. When she turns, it’s Alicia, whose eyes are streaked with tears, whose chest rises and falls from the effort of shouting. Alicia, Bella’s best friend. She glares at Cecily as if she’s single-handedly ruined her life. Which she has. Cecily Cole will leave Norton as soon as the house is sold, but Bella DiNatori will be dead forever.

More high school kids detach from the funeral to join the small crowd that’s descending fast on Cecily and her family. For a second, the only noise in the lot is the sound of passing cars and the shallow intakes of breath as one of the girls starts to sob.

Then Jada’s voice cuts through the crowd. “Bella got hit by a car,” she says, her voice emotionless. “Leave it.”

“She was my best friend!” Alicia yells. “And then you—” She starts crying and breaking down, with full-on heaving sobs. Miles emerges from the group behind her to grab her arm, but Alicia keeps shouting. “No—they—they’re the ones that should be dead. And now they’re at her funeral looking like it’s—fashion week or something—”

Cecily wills herself not to cry, not to break down on the pavement right then and there. She knows better than to try and explain that she doesn’t have any nondesigner options, that she only wore the veil so that no one would see her face.

That she, too, loved Bella.

“Alicia—” Miles isn’t the only one who is trying to pull Alicia away from Cecily. Some of the other kids are trying to calm her down, but she refuses.

Alicia rips her hand away from Miles. In silence, Alicia raises her phone and snaps a photograph of the Coles.

Alicia finally allows Miles to grab her and steer her away from the Coles. The small crowd of high school kids slowly dissolves behind them.

Only Jada lingers for a moment. She and Amber exchange a few hushed words. Cecily sees the pain in her sister’s eyes as she tells Jada she understands, she should go be with her friends now.

Once they finally reach the Range Rover, Cecily notices for the first time just how out of place it looks among the pickups and sedans in the parking lot. Even their car doesn’t fit in.

They’re about to pile into the vehicle when the police car screams down the street toward the funeral home. Cecily freezes. All eyes snap toward the church as a police car pulls up and Sheriff Yang and Officer Perry get out. Cecily tenses, half-convinced that they’re coming for her, coming to arrest her because Bella’s death is all her fault.

She can’t stop herself from panicking. What if—what if the police are going to arrest her parents? Her family? All the high school kids still have their phones out. What are they going to do when photographs of the Coles being forced into a police car go viral?

The police pull farther into the lot, but instead of coming for the Coles, they head into the funeral home. Rudy heads back toward the doors, and after a second, Cecily and Amber follow. They barely get halfway