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Brows dipping in confusion, I reach over and snatch up the thick paper. Noting the look on my face, Daya turns her attention back to me.
“What is it?”
My address is handwritten, but there’s no return address.
“I don’t know,” I mutter, eyeing the envelope like it’s a bomb. I can’t explain the exact feeling, but anxiety pools in the pit of my stomach.
Carefully, I peel open the flap, grab the thick stack of papers and slide them out. Except it’s not all just papers. Dozens of photographs fall out, along with a weathered note.
Daya and I glance at each other, our eyes connecting with mutual confusion and trepidation.
I pick up the pictures first, immediately recognizing a younger version of Gigi in them. Most of them, her smiling red lips stare back at me, the same man predominant in all the photos.
“Who is that?” I mutter, not expecting any real answer at the moment. I don’t recognize the man. He’s not pictured in any of the photographs that were hanging on the wall when I moved in.
Once I renovated the house, I decided to take them all down. I had decided that they’d judged me enough after the Greyson debacle.
Zade fucked me in that hallway last night—that’s as far as we made it before he pinned me up against the wall and took me from behind. When Zade and I had left the bedroom this morning, we had both discovered I had gouged nail marks into the paint. It was my only anchor with his hand firmly gripping my hair, bowing my body back, and using it as a rope as he fucked me into oblivion. I had collapsed after that orgasm, and he was forced to fuck me on the rug, right smack in the middle of the hallway.
I’ll never look at that spot on the rug or the wall the same.
So, I can only imagine how judgy their frozen eyes would be after not only seeing their descendent actually get railed this time, but by her stalker no less.
Thank god I took those down.
“Is there anything written on the back?” Daya asks, flipping over a few photos herself to look. I flip over mine and see a date written.
January 8th, 1944.
Several months before Gigi had started writing about her stalker.
In the picture is Gigi, smiling brightly up at the camera, her hair pinned into the type of curls you only saw in the 40s. Next to her, the unfamiliar man has an arm wrapped loosely around her, a slight smirk on his face. Something about him seems familiar, but I can’t put my finger on it.
“No names on this one," I observe, flipping over a few more pictures. All with dates but none that reveal the identity of the man.
We spread the photos out and arrange them in chronological order. The last picture is two weeks before her death.
Gigi seems to be curled in on herself, hunched and small as she holds a glass of wine. Her smile is strained, while the mystery man stands next to her, looking down at her with a pinched brow and a frown. At this point, she was already in fear for her life.
But from the man in the pictures, or someone else?
Next, I pick up the weathered letter. It’s addressed to Gigi.
My Genevieve,
It pains me to write this letter. I sit here and I mourn. For what could have been. For what could still be but yet you refuse to see.
I’ve loved you since the moment I saw you, Genevieve. I’ve loved you though you have married another. And now that I know you have given yourself to a different man—a man that’s not me, my love still persists.
I’ve waited so long for you already, and now yet another has come between us. Has stopped me from taking you as mine.
Why do you insist on doing this to me? To us?
It plagues me. Keeps me from sleeping at night. The only thing I can think of doing is cutting you from my life to end this misery. For good.
Sincerely,
Your true love
