I shouldn’t be thinking like that. I need to stay focused, because my life isn’t a love story.

If Mom were still alive, she might have prepared me for love. She might have made it magical. But all I know is that even when you find your soul mate, you are one terrible day from losing them.

Nan says that’s no way for a seventeen-year-old to think. She says chances are there to be taken.

“How about Saturday?” Danny asks.

“I can’t. We’re having a girls’ day out.”

Once a month, Emily, Hanna, and I go to Harmony, for a shopping trip to an outlet place called the Waves. We have a sleepover, rotating between our houses, and because Dad doesn’t have the energy to bother us, it’s always best when it’s here. When it’s at Hanna’s, her parents won’t leave us alone. Her dad especially—he fills every silence at the dinner table and comes into her room without knocking and understands hints about as much as I understand Hungarian. He’s as different from my dad as it’s possible to be. The others find it annoying, how friendly he is. They wish he would leave us alone. But I like that Hanna’s dad pays attention to us. It’s a nice change. At Emily’s, we feel guilty going to her room, so instead we watch movies in the living room with her mom.

So yes, everyone prefers coming to my house, because Dad leaves us alone. He never complains about the music being too loud. He never gets in the way.

“We can find a different time, then,” Danny says, and it could be my imagination, but he sounds disappointed.

Chapter 40

Almost every day, Sara the reporter stands outside my house, no one else, not even the photographer she was with the first time.

A quick look at the Doveton Messenger website told me she has only worked there since December. I would be her biggest story yet.

Last time, back when our story was national news, the newspapers printed whatever they wanted, making up lies when Dad and Nan refused to talk. This time, I want complete control: another chapter in the script I started on the first show.

“Hi,” I say.

Sara looks shocked, swallows, and says, “Hello.”

I’ve walked past her so many times that this has shaken her out of her routine. She doesn’t start firing questions at me. She looks nervous, waiting for me to fill the silence.

The newspapers have the power to make anything real. They were the ones who turned the Magpie Man from a character created by my dad to a name you couldn’t escape. Now I need them to do the same to me, even if I have to start small, even if my first interview is with the Messenger.