Page 42 of He Sees You

My face is unguarded in that way it only is when I think I'm alone.

There's something haunting about seeing yourself through someone else's eyes—this is how I look when I'm lost in thought, when I'm creating worlds in my head, when I'm not performing for anyone.

The angle is impossible.

Whoever took this was high up, level with my second-story window.

In a tree, maybe.

Watching me watch the world.

Beneath it, a page from my manuscript.

Not the published version, but one I deleted months ago.

My hands shake as I read my own words in someone else's handwriting at the bottom:Even your discarded thoughts are worth preserving.

This scene—it's the one where my heroine realizes she loves her stalker.

The one Juliette said would alienate readers, make them question the heroine's sanity.

I deleted it in the middle of the night after too much wine and self-doubt.

No one should have this.

I emptied my trash, cleared my cloud storage.

Thisshouldn'texist.

But someone saved it.

Someone thought my darkest impulses were worth keeping.

The skeleton key is antique, brass gone dark with age. It could open anything or nothing. A metaphor or a promise.

I turn it over in my fingers, feeling its weight, its potential.

There's something etched in the handle—initials maybe, too worn to read.

Someone has been in my room.

Multiple times.

They've read my deleted words, taken my picture, left me gifts that feel more intimate than any touch.

I should be terrified, should be calling my father, packing my bags, fleeing back to the city.

Instead, I'm opening my laptop.

The words come like blood from a wound—necessary, painful, beautiful.

I write about a woman who finds pieces of herself in a stranger's hands.

About the violation of being seen,reallyseen, and discovering you want to be visible after all.

About the difference between being watched and being witnessed.

She kept the gifts in a drawer that locked, not to hide them but to keep them sacred. Each one a piece of evidence thatsomeone found her worthy of study. Her mother had always said she was too much—too dark, too intense, too hungry for things nice girls shouldn't want. But he saw all that darkness and left her gifts anyway. Not despite her shadows but because of them.