Page 10 of He Sees You

The police scanner on my counter crackles to life. "Unit 3 to base. We've got another 10-54 off Route 73."

Dead body.

My lips twitch.

They found Monica Reeves faster than expected.

The cold must have preserved her better than the others.

Usually, it takes at least a week for hikers to stumble across my gifts.

Monica was special though—she'd been selling her twelve-year-old daughter to men from Albany.

The daughter is safe now, in foster care downstate.

She'll never know that the monster who killed her mother was actually saving her.

Sheriff Sterling's voice cuts through the static. "Secure the scene. Nobody touches anything until I get there. And for Christ's sake, keep this off the radio. We don't need the press getting wind before—" He stops. "Just secure it. I'm ten minutes out."

He sounds tired.

Broken, almost.

Good.

Broken men make mistakes, and I need him distracted for what comes next.

I pull up Celeste's manuscript on my laptop—not the published version, but the one with all her notes, her deleted scenes, her raw thoughts.

Juliette gave me access to her cloud storage two years ago so I could "help with technical details" for a hunting scene.

She forgot to revoke it.

Or maybe she didn't forget.

Sometimes I wonder what my sister knows versus what she pretends not to know.

There's a scene Celeste cut from her second book.

The heroine is being watched but doesn't know it yet.

She wrote:The feeling of eyes on her was like standing in sunlight through glass—warm and cold simultaneously, comforting and dangerous, making her skin prickle with awareness of something she couldn't name.

She felt me, even then.

Before she knew I existed, some part of her recognized what was coming.

The same way deer sometimes freeze before the shot, not from fear but from acceptance.

From recognition of something larger than themselves.

I move to the back room, the one I keep locked when anyone visits.

Not that anyone visits except Juliette, and only rarely.

The walls are covered with photos—not of Celeste, though I have those too, hidden deeper.

These are the others.