The Follower by Kate Doughty (ebook reader with built in dictionary TXT) 📕

out of breath from searching the entire first floor. “There’s no one down here. Whatever—whoever—they’re gone. It’s okay, kids.” He surveys the damage in the kitchen and lets out a breath as he takes everything in. “It’s going to be okay,” he repeats. Cecily can’t tell if he’s talking to them or to himself. She feels her throat seize up. Why didn’t the house alarm go off?

Next to Amber, Mrs. Cole has a hand over her mouth. Her mother is trembling, clearly trying not to cry. Amber grabs her mom’s shoulder. Finally, she splutters out some words. “Call—the crew, call Joseph, call whoever you can get over here. We need to fix this.”

“Marie, it’s four a.m. We have an open house in five hours. We can’t—we can’t—”

Mrs. Cole starts to hyperventilate. “This . . . ,” she starts. But she doesn’t have to say it. Cecily and the others know. They can’t show the house like this. They can’t sell the house like this. And they need to; they need to sell the house so, so badly . . .

“We have to do something,” she stammers. “We can’t afford, we can’t . . . Cecily . . .”

Cecily feels her face heat. Unconsciously, her hand goes to the covering over her left eye. Her right one is crying, two single tears trickling down her cheek. Cecily. Of course her injury is making everything so, so much worse. Her mom can barely keep it together—not because of the break-in, but because of what it means for this family and for her. For Cecily.

“We can fix this,” Rudy says.

“We can clean it up, do something . . .”

“We can’t cancel the open house on such short notice,” Mrs. Cole says, so quiet that it’s barely audible. “People are coming in from . . .”

Mr. Cole gives her a tight squeeze. “I’ll see who I can get.” The look on her dad’s face confirms for Cecily that they both feel the same kind of guilt: her at being the new burden, him at being the older one.

Mr. Cole doesn’t gamble anymore, but it seems as if he is still willing to bet on this house. So he leaves to make frantic calls for help.

At the other end of the kitchen, Mrs. Cole is also on the phone, trying to reach the police. Cecily and her siblings listen to the half-conversation as she finally connects with Officer Perry. She listens to her mom’s voice deescalate from frantic to calm, measured, resigned. Finally, she hangs up. When she turns back to the triplets, Cecily knows that this isn’t going to be good.

“I’ve talked to the officer, and the police will be over . . . but not until after the open house,” she says, her voice strained. “We can’t have cop cars at our house the morning of the open house—if someone sees—” She cuts herself off. “We need every second between now and the open house to fix . . . everything, anyway,” she says, as if she’s trying to convince herself that this is the right thing to do. “We can’t host an open house mid-investigation. It would destroy any chance we have of making a sale.” The triplets nod. Privately, Cecily wonders if they still have one. If they do, her mother is right. The Coles can’t afford any more bad press.

Through some miracle, Joseph is able to come. Amber and Cecily watch from the upstairs landing as he walks in, bedraggled and mussed from sleep. But he’s here. He looks at Cecily and her siblings and tries to muster a smile.

Cecily almost hugs him for it.

She follows along as her parents and Joseph survey the downstairs. With the lights on, the damage only becomes more obvious. There’s paint splattered across the wall, over the floors, on the counter. It extends to the living room, where the cushions of their massive, brand-new sectional have been slashed open. This room had also received the same floor and paint treatment as the kitchen. It’s so, so much. Cecily doesn’t know how they’re going to fix this.

But they are going to try. Together, Cecily’s family and Joseph spend the next few hours scrubbing the walls, floors, and counters clean. They get some of it out—but the damage cannot be reversed entirely. They try to cover up some of the destruction by doing things like hanging every photo frame they have to cover the stains on the walls. A happy stock family stares back at Cecily from the one she hangs, as if they’re mocking her. Some of the countertops, too, can’t be salvaged. They have to resort to an odd assortment of place mats and table runners that look, well, almost as bad as the paint, in Cecily’s opinion. She feels dread sink in her stomach like a stone.

The floor is perhaps the hardest thing to fix, or even cover up. In a last fit of desperation, Mrs. Cole and Amber drive a half hour to a carpeting store that opens at seven a.m. and return with a carpet that clashes with everything but covers the unmistakable traces of the follower’s lettering in the foyer.

Cecily almost wants to laugh at the absurdity of it all. At least now all aspects of the house look uniformly terrible. No amount of interior-design talk from Mrs. Cole will convince anyone that this was an intentional aesthetic choice.

As the morning sun settles in the sky, Amber and Cecily paint over the kitchen walls as best they can, but there’s no hiding the damage. The beautiful marble countertops—which cost more than anyone can stand to think about now—are still stained no matter how hard Rudy scrubs, and the Coles don’t have time to really deal with the floor.

As Cecily pauses to look around the kitchen, she imagines that she can feel Amber’s eyes on her. Wondering why she didn’t wake everyone up when she heard the intruder. Wondering why, if Cecily can’t be perfect anymore, she can’t at least be good enough. Good enough to have at least tried to stop what had just happened . . .

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