Page 15 of By the Time You Read This (Raisa Susanto #3)

By Essi Halla

I’ll never be able to eat casseroles again.

Don’t get me wrong, I can’t complain about the outpouring of generosity that followed news of my father’s death.

Suicide. Homicide. Whatever it was, he was gone. And though he’d never cooked a day in his life—nor had my mother, mind you—our refrigerator was now constantly filled with casseroles that tasted of sawdust and sympathy.

I had never realized we’d had that many friends. My parents were wealthy beyond most people’s imagination. The only reason anyone could even get casseroles to us was because our gated mansion had been seized by the police two months earlier and we were in a major downgrade of a rental in the suburbs of Phoenix. I think most of the ladies that brought them by mostly wanted to gawk at my mother and me.

We still had our fancy clothes back then.

My mother still had some money the feds hadn’t found so we weren’t living on the streets. We even had a maid, so for those few kind souls who were about to feel anything but disgust for us, you should go ahead and rethink that sentiment.

The maid ate the casseroles. Well, she ate some of them, and then took others god-knew-where, after cooking us salmon or lobster or steak.

Do you hate me yet?

Should it matter if you do?

I’m still a person who lost her father.

My mother wouldn’t eat the salmon or lobster or steak. I’d never thought my parents’ marriage was a love match, but the death along with the loss of her lifestyle hit my mother hard.

Three months after my father’s death, my mother took a bottle of some kind of pills liberally prescribed to her by a doctor too greedy to say no, and then never woke up.

I had lots of casseroles then.

That time, I tried to eat them.

I fired the maid, which was probably not a smart thing to do considering I’d never learned to cook in my life. But I survived off those casseroles—and take-out, I’m not a martyr here.

I ate those casseroles and tried to believe that they were worth waking up for every day.

Spoiler alert, they weren’t. They were terrible.

I thought about making an appointment with that doctor who would still have prescribed me a lethal dose of something even though my parents had both just killed themselves.

I had my phone in my hands, ready to do it.

And then came a knock, just like so many others in the days before it. I couldn’t stomach one more casserole.

But I answered the door, because if I didn’t one of the ladies who brought the casseroles would probably call the cops.

Everyone knew I was hanging on by a thread.

It wasn’t one of my neighbors at my door, though.

Instead it was a girl. She asked, “Do you know who killed your father?”

And that’s when I found something besides the casseroles to make each day worth waking up for.