“What the hell is that?” Rachel asked. She was in the kitchen with my dad, helping with the dinner dishes. Since what happened at the camp, she’d been glued to us even tighter. It was aggravating, no matter how genuine her intentions (and I still wasn’t convinced). “Actually, forget I asked. I don’t care what it is—stop reading it.”

Rachel often used that overly familiar way with us like she was a member of our loud, no-holds-barred family and she was allowed to shout because it was all out of love anyway. Except we were not loud, and whenever she used that tone, it set my teeth on edge. As annoyed as I was at Gideon for torturing my dad by reading that blog, I was even more annoyed at Rachel for talking to him that way. I had a hard time imagining she ever could have been my mom’s friend.

Rachel and my mom had met in the third grade in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and somehow had managed to stay best friends for years, through different high schools, separate colleges, and then different graduate programs. When they finally got their first jobs, they had been thrilled to land in Boston together. Rachel was my mom’s maid of honor, and there were countless pictures of Rachel holding Gideon and me as babies.

Then, suddenly, Rachel was gone. Out of our life. Once, when my mom had been trying to comfort me about the distance between Cassie and me, she had said that she and Rachel had grown apart, too. But their separation had been so sudden and complete. I could tell even then—long before I knew that I was an Outlier—that my mom was leaving out important details. When Rachel reappeared after my mom’s funeral I had thought about asking my dad what had really happened between them, but he’d been so overwhelmed and sad that it had felt stupid and wrong to care. And there was a tiny part of me that had felt comforted being around someone who had even once upon a time been so close to my mom.

“It’s Dad’s stalker,” Gideon said of the passage, obviously enjoying Rachel’s reaction. “EndOfDays. He’s in The Collective, and he blames Dad for basically everything.”

“What?” Rachel asked as she handed my dad another rinsed plate for the dishwasher, then dried her hands on a towel. “What is Gideon talking about, Ben? What stalker?”

“A guy with too much time on his hands. To be honest, I don’t think he knows what he wants. He’s angry, that’s all. No one reads it anyway.”

“You mean, except the 3,523 people who commented,” Gideon said. “But who’s counting?”

“Ben?!” Rachel shouted. “Have you talked to the police? That doesn’t sound like something you should ignore.”