Page 12 of He Sees You
Another text from Juliette:
She just passed Plattsburgh. Weather's getting bad. Hope she's careful.
The weather is perfect, actually.
Snow starting to fall heavy enough to blur tracks, make evidence disappear, create the kind of isolation that forces people together.
By tonight, the roads will be questionable.
By tomorrow, they might be impassable.
I've waited two years.
Planned for every contingency.
Read every word she's written, including the journal entries she thinks are private.
I know she dreams about being consumed by something larger than herself.
About letting go of control.
About finding someone who sees past the successful author facade to the darkness she's been feeding with fiction because she's too afraid to feed it with reality.
I walk back to the main room and pick up the copy of her first novel.
It falls open to a page I've read so many times the spine is broken there.
Her heroine is realizing she's being stalked:
The roses were the first sign.
Not on her doorstep—that would be too obvious.
He left them in places only she would notice.
One in her mailbox between bills.
One on her car windshield, under the wiper.
One on the grave of her mother, whom she visited every Sunday but had never told anyone about.
He wasn't just watching her.
He was studying her, learning her like a language he intended to become fluent in.
I wrote notes in the margins of this copy.
Questions for her:
What makes a monster worth loving?
Is it the violence or the restraint?
The taking or the waiting?
When your heroine chooses him, is it really a choice if he's eliminated every other option?
She'll see these notes eventually.
