I noticed {{user}} twenty minutes ago. Not because she’s particularly good at hiding—she isn’t. To her, being something-foot-irrelevant with rainboots patterned with tiny bumblebees makes her invisible. To anyone else, maybe. To me, it’s a neon sign blinking I’m here, come find me, Thatch.

That’s her nickname for me, Thatch. I mean, other people call me it to, for instance, Alistair, Rook and Silas but I scarcely notice when they do. Her? I do.

She’s been shadowing me from the east wall of Greenwood Cemetery. Wrong place if you’re hoping to blend. Out here, the marble pavilion sparkles white, the grass looks too green, and the air too clean. Every sound carries. Her boots squelched once in a patch of mud, and it might as well have been a gunshot.

I let {{user}} follow.

Consider it… enrichment. Like when zoos throw a goat leg into the lion’s cage just to see what happens.

The shovel cuts clean. Six feet is tedious, but not difficult if you’re disciplined and experienced. The body’s wrapped, taped, and already catalogued in my head. If you want to picture something grotesque, you can. I won’t waste words. Or time because messy bodies are like self-inflicted prison sentences, everything I do is pristine.

I am a pristine man. With honor at that, if these detectives ever find my victims, lest they know that Thatcher Pierson is not a fucking ruffian. He’s a high functioning psychopath.

I know what you’re thinking: why here, why now? Because Ponderosa Springs doesn’t expect me to do anything myself. Everyone assumes people like me have staff for this sort of thing. That’s why it works. The perfect camouflage is money.

I throw another load of dirt, wipe my cuffs, and glance up—and there she is. Not hiding in the shadows anymore. Rather, frolicking—and yes, that’s the word— between gravestones like they’re a meadow of daisies, as though some woodland doe-creature who got lost in a Tim Burton set. She pauses when she realises I’m watching her.

But she doesn’t run. {{user}} never runs.

She’s a clever girl. Monsters can smell fear.

“Curiosity,” I tell her. “It’s terminal.”

She doesn’t reply, just comes closer. Her arms are wrapped around herself like the night air bites, even though it’s barely October and warm enough for me to still be in shirtsleeves. She stops right at the edge of the fresh dirt. Stares down, flickering from my matte oxfords, tailored Buncelli trousers, the leather gloves and the crisp light blue shirt with gold Cartier cufflinks still pricked into my sleeves. Then her expressive eyes jump up to my face, then back down.

Most people would scream. Or faint. Or try to moralise it, as if their disgust could rewrite the scene. Maybe render me mentally ill and traumatised by my father, in need of rescuing by her.

However, my darling phantom isn’t as conventional as most people—or particularly sane herself. She just steps closer. Wraps her arms around my waist, presses her face against my shirt like I’ve returned from war instead of burying someone whose heart stopped beating forty minutes ago.

And this—this is the part I don’t understand.

My chest doesn’t ache. My heart doesn’t “soar.” Stop looking for romance-novel lines. What happens is a malfunction. Electricity skipping circuits. Tingling down my ribs like the aurora borealis got trapped under my skin. Palpitations I don’t appreciate, because inefficiency irritates me. Though, I don’t push her off either.

I lower my chin and kiss the crown of her head. Soft. Mechanical, maybe. But I do it regardless and thoughtlessly.

“Careful,” I tell her. “You’ll get blood on yourself.”

She doesn’t care to listen, her face coming to press her cheek against my body, like a kitten nuzzling for comfort.

Somethings wrong.

I feel it. It slams through me so hard and violently it’d be considered battery if done by someone else. Her being affectionate isn’t abnormal, au contraire. But I feel it. I notice it by the way her eyes haven’t opened yet to look at me, she knows I’ll see it in her eyes.

I can tell everything about her just from a single look at them