Marianne Hale hated waking up to silence.
It used to comfort her. Now it only reminded her that something had shifted. That the world had gone slightly off-axis the moment that envelope arrived.
She sat at the edge of her bed, the manuscript resting on her nightstand like a sleeping animal. She hadn't touched it since yesterday. But it didn't matter. The words were already stuck in her head, looping like a song with no end.
She died with her eyes open.
She reached for her phone and opened the case database. The body found behind West 43rd was still unnamed. Female. Mid-thirties. No ID. The police suspected a mugging gone wrong.
They didn't know what Marianne knew. That the broken finger, the exact location, the expression on the woman's face, it was all on the page days before the body was found.
Marianne tapped her fingers against her knee.
Coincidence? No. She didn't believe in those.
She needed to find Elias Mercer.
The man was an odd one brilliant, but intense. He'd helped her consult on a few profiling cases years back. Quiet. Blunt. But he had a good sense for patterns. And this ....this felt like the start of one.
She grabbed her coat, keys, and the first ten pages of the manuscript, then headed out.
Elias's office hadn't changed.
Books stacked in corners. Articles pinned to the walls. A coffee mug that looked like it hadn't been washed since last winter. Marianne waited by the door as he read through the pages she'd handed him, his expression unreadable.
Finally, he looked up.
"This isn't published work."
"No."
"You're sure it's from her?"
Marianne nodded. "I'd recognize her handwriting anywhere. Her voice, too. The phrasing, the rhythm.....it's her."
Elias leaned back in his chair. "And the timing? You got this before the body was found?"
"Three days before," she confirmed. "I checked the timestamp on my security camera. No one was in frame. Just the envelope appearing on my porch."
He tapped the page with his pen. "And this... footnote. 'She reminds me of you.' You think that was meant for you personally?"
Marianne hesitated. "Senna always played with layers in her writing. Blurring the line between reader and character. But yes, I think it was intentional."
Elias narrowed his eyes slightly. "What if it wasn't her?"
Marianne blinked. "What?"
"What if someone else wrote this copied her style, used her name, her voice to send a message? To you."
The idea chilled her.
"I've seen this before," he added. "Writers with obsessive fans. Former patients with vendettas. People who lose track of where the fiction ends and real life begins."
"But Senna isn't just anyone," Marianne said. "She didn't lose control. She chose to disappear. She walked away from everything. There was a reason for that."
Elias looked back down at the manuscript.
"She may not have stayed gone."
Back in her car, Marianne sat for several minutes without turning the key.
Was it guilt that drove her? Or instinct?
She'd been Senna's therapist for almost two years before it all unraveled. She remembered the brilliance behind the pain the way Senna could pick apart her own mind like a puzzle, then tape it back together with fiction. But she'd also seen the fractures, the sleeplessness, the episodes she refused to label.
Senna had always insisted she wasn't crazy.
Just cursed with too much clarity.
Marianne took a breath and started the car.
She needed to know if this was just the beginning or if it was already too late to stop what was coming.