But that doesn’t happen. It never has. Mom was murdered before I was old enough to truly piss her off. She left my life with holes I fill with made-up memories, and I hate it.

I wish we’d had the raging fights you see on TV, the stupid arguments about nothing. I wish I didn’t have quite so many missing pieces—the conversations we never had, the feelings we never shared.

What hurts most is her absence, the complete lack of her touch and her voice and her smell. That’s what they don’t tell you when you lose someone, that they’re gone in more ways than you can count.

-

I get home from the meeting with the others and go straight upstairs to my room, where I’ve been writing the script for my first episode.

I know it’s supposed to be spontaneous, but I can’t risk that.

There’s a plan, and I need to stick to it, which means saying certain things early on to set it in motion.

The quicker I go viral, the sooner people are talking about me, the better chance we have of finding him.

How will the others prepare? Will they change their plans now that Adrian has pitted us against one another? Ryan and Ella might, Lucas probably thinks he doesn’t have to, and I have no idea about Sonia.

When Dad knocks on the door, I jump. He mumbles an apology and says, “How was your day?” He’s trying to care even though he hates that I’m doing this.

“Okay,” I say.

I could give him more. I could tell him about the others, about the competition, about the food we ate at the restaurant and how we didn’t pay a penny.

But I stick with “okay” because I need to focus. Then, as he turns to leave, I say, “Dad…”

He smiles his broken smile, and I say, “Thanks for saying yes.”

He nods, glances quickly around my room, then leaves.

I have a month, hopefully three, to catch a serial killer, but no one will watch if they hate me. I need to be likable, watchable, someone the audience can connect with.

I need to be the perfect reality star, which, thankfully, is nothing like being the perfect person.

Chapter 13

I live in Doveton, a place only famous for the town next door. People only stop here to ask how close they are to Harmony. They only come in to go out the other side.

Harmony has a beach and restaurants and hotels. It has sand sculptors and galleries and a six-screen movie theater. Doveton has a Pizza Hut.

Before Mom’s murder, it was safe, boring, unnewsworthy. The day before she died, a man committed suicide in the cemetery—all the town’s tragedy wrapped up in a single week—and in the years since then, it has gone back to its old routine.