My Family Wants Me Gone, I Take Their Luck With Me novel · Chapter 11 of 32

Chapter 11: Lunch Rush

Arlo put the phone face down on the counter.

"A man none of us knows," he said. "I've been called worse."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. You didn't make the video."

But by six, the video had made everything else.

My name was the top search in the city. Under it, people had found Arlo's name, the diner's name and a photo of the pier from the bait-shop's website.

The comments came in so fast my phone got hot.

Get help Noelle.

Your poor sister.

Who even is this diner guy?

Some of them were strange. The same sentence, word for word, from twenty different accounts with no faces.

Noelle Penhurst is unstable and her family is scared for her.

I knew that sentence. It was the kind of sentence I used to write.

Somebody was paying for it.

At seven, the first news van parked in the pier lot.

At eight, there were four.

By ten, reporters lined both sides of the boardwalk with cameras on their shoulders. They filmed the diner windows. They filmed the carousel tarp. They filmed the bait-shop chalkboard, which the old man had changed to read NO COMMENT.

One of them caught Marigold at the bus stop with her carousel backpack.

"Sweetheart, does Noelle live with your uncle?"

Arlo came out of the diner so fast the yarn bell flew off the door.

He walked straight down the steps and put himself between the camera and Marigold.

He didn't touch the cameraman. He didn't have to. He was a head taller and he didn't blink.

"She's eight. Get your lens off her."

The cameraman backed up.

Arlo walked Marigold to the bus and waited until it pulled away. Then he came back inside, white around the mouth.

"They can film me all day. Not her."

"I know. I'll handle it."

"How?"

"I used to do this for a living."

By noon, the diner was packed.

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