No One You Know Read Online Free PDF

you to ask me before you started?”
    He said nothing.
    “I trusted you,” I said, feeling stupid. I thought about his endless questions, his incessant note-taking, and how I’d answered every question he asked, never really stopping to consider his motives.
    He reached across the table and put his hand on mine. I pulled away.
    “I thought you might be reluctant, and I completely understand. That’s why I wanted to get the ball rolling before I told you.” He reached into his bag and pulled out a file folder, which he slid across the table to me. I opened it. The stack of papers inside was two inches thick. I read the title page, feeling sick to my stomach.
             
    MURDER BY THE BAY
    A True Tale of San Francisco Noir
    by Andrew Thorpe, Ph.D.
             
    During the next few weeks, I saw Thorpe on several occasions. Each time, I begged him not to go ahead with the book, and each time, he refused. “Have you read it?” he would ask eagerly. “If you read it, I think you’ll change your mind.” But I didn’t want to read it. I didn’t need to relive, through someone else’s lens, the horror of Lila’s death.
    The last time Thorpe and I talked was a foggy day on Ocean Beach, after I’d told my parents about the book. They had been devastated, and my normally calm father had been unable to hide his anger.
    “You brought Andrew Thorpe into this house,” he said. “He had dinner with us. We trusted him because he was your friend.”
    Thorpe and I walked along the shoreline, faces cold and wet from the fog. “I’m asking you one last time,” I pleaded. “For me, for my parents, for Lila. Just let this go.”
    “Ellie,” he said. “I can’t.”
    “That’s it?” I asked.
    He looked out at the ocean, where an enormous ship was making its way slowly toward the bay. “I’m sorry,” he said.
    I turned and walked away. When I was halfway to the board-walk, he shouted something, but his words were drowned out by the waves.

Four

    F OR SEVERAL YEARS AFTER L ILA DIED , I wandered. It took me longer than it should have to complete my B.A. in literature, after which I worked as a waitress and an office temp in order to finance my travels around the U.S.—endless road trips in beat-up cars with on-again, off-again boyfriends. Eventually, I went alone to Europe. The summer after I finished high school and Lila graduated from Berkeley, our parents had paid for the two of us to spend six weeks backpacking by Eurail. We had so much fun on our trip, we vowed to do it again in five years. With Lila gone, the five-year mark came and went without fanfare. I lived in a kind of suspension, having never found a clear path forward. Four years later than planned, I bought a one-way ticket across the Atlantic. I spent the summer of my twenty-seventh year retracing the steps that Lila and I had made together. I traveled the same route we had traveled, from Amsterdam to Paris, Paris to Barcelona, across to Venice, up through Germany, and finally back to the Netherlands. I visited the same museums, even tried to sleep in the same hostels, though more often than not I couldn’t find them, as I’d never bothered to keep a journal.
    I bought a book of mini-biographies of famous mathematicians and visited several of their graves—Blaise Pascal at Saint Etiennedu-Mont in Paris, Carl Gauss at the Albanifriedhof in Göttingen, Germany, Leibniz in Hanover, Christian Doppler at the Cimitero di San Michele in Venice. Visiting the gravesites of the mathematicians Lila had admired was a posthumous gift to my sister, one which served no practical purpose, but in some way I couldn’t quite explain, it made me feel closer to her.
    Upon my return home, I continued working temp jobs, moving from one office to the next with no sense of joy or purpose. I often wondered what Lila would be doing, had she lived. Surely, it would be a great deal more than this; her life, I knew, would have amounted to something. A decade after