Page 141 of He Sees You
"Technically you're not a widow."
"I'm widowed from my old life. That counts."
Two weeks pass in a strange blur of investigation and performance.
Celeste plays her part flawlessly—the shocked daughter learning horrible truths about her father.
The police find more evidence in the burned buildings, all pointing to a trafficking ring at war with itself.
The surviving network members flee.
Those who don't run end up dead in various accidents—car crashes, hunting mishaps, sudden illnesses.
Thalia's network is thorough, though we help with two of them.
A honeymoon trip to Burlington that happens to coincide with a trafficker's house fire.
Celeste's book launches three weeks after the wedding.
Her publisher fast-tracks it to capitalize on the tragedy. "Dark Romance Becomes Too Real"—the headlines write themselves.
A daughter who wrote about killing fathers, whose actual father died mysteriously.
The bookfliesoff shelves.
We do interviews via video, Celeste in black, mourning her monster.
She dedicates the book "To all the daughters with complicated fathers, and to my husband, who showed me that darkness can be love."
The sales are astronomical.
Everyone wants to read the "prophetic" book about patricide.
They call it fiction that predicted reality, not knowing it's reality dressed as fiction.
"You're famous," I tell her one night, watching her field emails from movie producers.
"We're famous. The grieving daughter and her reclusive husband. The beauty and the beast of the Adirondacks."
"What now?"
She closes the laptop, comes to sit on my lap. "Now we hunt."
"More trafficking rings?"
"More everything. Predators, abusers, the people who slip through cracks in justice. We have money from the book, freedom from suspicion, and a taste for necessary violence."
"A killing honeymoon that never ends."
"Exactly."
She shows me her research—a network operating out of Albany, connected to Sterling's but independent.
Three main players, all with histories of violence against women.
She's found their patterns, their weaknesses, their schedules.
"When?" I ask.
