When he doesn’t, I say, “Fifty-one seconds from home, she was strangled to death and left to be rained on all night.”

They say to start with a bang, and that’s the biggest one I’ve got.

The man types words I can’t see while the woman stares at me.

“I was seven,” I say. I’m seventeen now.

The man clears his throat and asks, “Do you think you’re the only applicant to have lost a parent?”

I shrug.

“You’re not. But you are the only applicant whose mother was the victim of a serial killer.”

The woman writes something on a notepad and pushes it toward him.

He nods and says, “We’ll be in touch.”

Chapter 2

My name is Jessica Simmons, and I’m not your average internet star. But then I guess this isn’t your average internet show.

The ads say it’s something different—a real look inside the lives of real people. No scripts, no airbrushing, no scenes set up for your entertainment. Just you and a camera crew and whatever you want to show.

If this was halfway through the story rather than the start, I guess you’d call it a twist, because I’m not the kind of person to stream their life on YouTube. You’ll have to take my word for it that this is out of character for me.

Mom was thirty-two when she died, the first victim of a man they still haven’t caught. Number one on a list that now stretches to thirteen.

So if you ask why I want to be one of the five people to star in a new online show about them and only them, it’s pretty simple.

I want to catch the Magpie Man, and this is how I’m going to do it.

Chapter 3

It’s been so long since Mom died that sometimes I doubt my own memories, even though the house is full of her pictures and her echoes live in the cracks on Dad’s face.

It was Dad who gave the murderer his name. He said the Magpie Man liked shiny things and Mom was the shiniest of all. He said she’d been borrowed.

“Like a library book?” I’d asked, and he’d said sort of, but without a date to bring her back.

Now I realize it was for his benefit as much as mine: when a husband loses his wife, the last thing he needs is a kid asking questions.

When you’re seven, you don’t think your dad’s full of shit, because he’s the person who hugs you and kisses you and keeps you safe. Why would he lie?

He should have said that was our little secret. But he didn’t, so I told everyone at school that the pretty moms would all be taken eventually, and Dad got called in for that.