I'm the most hated stalker fan on the internet.
He's Callum Wren — Best Actor frontrunner, Vanity Fair September cover, ocean-glass eyes.
I track his call sheets. I sit in the Chateau Marmont valet line until the night manager learns my face. I dig through the bagged trash his housekeepers leave at the Mulholland curb. I am, as forty-seven thousand of his fans put it on X, a thing that should not exist in daylight.
Then one night I film him kill a woman.
He doesn't call 911.
He wipes his hands on a hotel towel and smiles into my camera.
"Quinn. Help me, just this once. After this, I'm only yours."
I help him move the body. I help him wipe the suite. I help him kill the floor's camera feed for the eleven minutes that matter.
I become his most loyal accomplice. I become, in the small private voice he saves for the back of black SUVs, his good girl.
The night of his Vanity Fair afterparty, on a livestream that's already trending in nine countries, he points across the ballroom and tells the police it was me.
He says I killed his girlfriend Bryce out of love-poisoned jealousy.
While they zip-tie me on the carpet, he mouths a single line across the room. The cameras catch it. The stan accounts will slow-mo it for weeks.
Thank you, my little cleaner.
But he doesn't know.
The body I fed to the crematory furnace was never Bryce Halloway.
The first time I see Callum Wren, he's already three years into being the reason my sister is dead. I just don't know it yet.
I'm sitting on the floor of the storage unit in Van Nuys where the building manager dumped Tessa's things after the lease expired. Cardboard boxes, a duffel of her costumes from background work, a Ziploc of expired prenatals nobody told me about.
In a copy of The Magus I gave her for her twenty-second birthday, a ticket stub falls out. Folded so many times the creases are white. IFC Center. Last Light at Ojai. The A24 indie that put a particular British unknown on Sundance's short list.
On the back, in her hand:
Callum says when he wins the BAFTA he'll tell them about me.
I read it twice. I do not cry. I put the stub in my wallet and zip the wallet shut.
Three years ago Tessa called me at 11:47 p.m. from somewhere with wind on the line.
"Quinnie. Don't trust the people on the screen."
The line cut.
Three days later a sheriff's deputy found a single Sam Edelman sandal on the rocks below Point Dume. No body. No witnesses. No cameras on that stretch of PCH. The county filed it under presumed drowned and moved her into a folder that nobody opens.
Six months after that, Last Light at Ojai won the Audience Award at Sundance, and Callum Wren walked onto every late-night couch in America. By the next awards cycle he was at the Globes in a white Tom Ford suit, eyes wet on cue.
"This is for someone who can't be in the room tonight."
The room stood. He let them.
I was watching from a TV mounted over the bar where I worked back then. I had a tray of Negronis in my hands. I almost dropped them, because pinned through the lapel of that white suit was a small dull-blue stone I'd put in a jeweler's box for Tessa's twenty-fifth birthday. A vintage sapphire tie-tack. The cut was Edwardian. I'd bought it at a Pasadena estate sale, paid in tips.
I did not turn the channel. I served the Negronis. I went home. I sat on my bed and opened a new account on X.
@quinnstalkscallum.
The handle was the cover. People only see what their first read tells them to see, and the first read on a girl with that handle is another lonely one. Inside ninety days I had two thousand followers and three blocked numbers from his publicist. Fans called me a leech. Marco Pellegrini's bodyguards put their hands on me twice at LAX. The gossip aggregators learned my face.
#QuinnAvaraGetHelp. #CallumDeservesPeace.
I never responded. The worse my name got, the closer he was forced to look.
Three months in, he looks. Underground garage at the Beverly Hilton, two a.m., post-DGA dinner. The line of black SUVs has thinned. He's in a cashmere hood, mask up, only the eyes showing — the eyes the fan accounts have nicknamed ocean glass.
"You've been following me a while," he says. Conversational. Like we're at a brunch. "What do you want."
I keep my phone in my pocket. My hand on the phone is steady.
"I want you to remember me."
He laughs once, very softly, behind the mask.
That's the moment the hook sets. He thinks he's the one who caught it.
Callum Wren is very good at handing out tenderness in single sugar packets.
When a Chateau Marmont security guard puts a hand flat on my sternum and walks me backwards into a planter, Callum is the one who steps around the planter and helps me up. The paparazzi get it on a 200mm lens. The next morning the Daily Mail runs it under CALLUM WREN HELPS TROUBLED FAN.
When the stan accounts call me a rabid dog in the comments of his GQ cover, his assistant Marco appears at the Sweetgreen on Sunset where I'm eating alone and sets a chilled bottle of Topo Chico in front of me without a word.
When it's 1 a.m. and I'm sitting on the curb outside his hotel because I have nowhere better to be, my phone buzzes from a number I haven't saved.
Go home, Quinn. It's cold out there.
Each one is a sugar packet thrown at a starving dog. I lick the wrapper. I post a photo of the empty wrapper. I let the comments say what they want about my dignity.
The fan group I infiltrated under a burner account screenshots a paparazzi long-lens of Callum walking out of LAX customs in Paris, and someone tags me underneath: she followed him to fucking France lmao.
I post a blurry photo of a Parisian sidewalk with my Doc Martens in frame. I caption it: wherever he is, i am.
The group goes nuclear.
sick bitch. kill yourself. we're gonna lose him because of you, do you understand.
That night Marco Pellegrini calls me from a private number.
"Quinn. Stop. He's not okay right now. You're going to break him."
In the background I hear glass break. Not a wine glass — something heavier. A short, hard scream from a woman, choked off.
The line dies.
I'm in an Uber to the Chateau within ninety seconds. The driver doesn't ask why I'm not wearing shoes. I left them in the apartment.
The studio has the entire fifth floor on a block-booking for The Silent Floor press week. The fire-stair door at the end of the hall is propped open with a folded LA Times. I walk past it without breaking pace.
Bungalow seven. The door is unlatched.
A woman is on her side on the rug between the wet bar and the sectional. Black silk slip dress. Hair fanned. The back of her head is a wet ruin and the rug under it is darker than the rug.
Callum is standing two steps away in his shirtsleeves, holding the base of a SAG Award statuette. The bronze base. Heavier than people think. He'd kept it on the wet-bar shelf because he liked the joke of a self-portrait.
He sees me. He doesn't startle.
He crouches and, slowly, closes the woman's eyes with two fingers.
"You got all of it."
I look down at my phone. The red record dot is still pulsing.
He walks toward me. I take one step back; the wallpaper presses cold against my shoulder blades. He doesn't reach for the phone. He reaches for my face. His fingertips are wet and the wet is rust-warm and he traces a line from my cheekbone to my jaw with it.
"Quinn." Quiet. Close. "You said you loved me more than anyone."
My throat closes.
"Yes."
"So help me. Just this once."
His mouth at my ear. Tender as anything he's done on a Sundance Q&A stage.
"Starting tonight, you're the most important person in my life."
The body on the rug is not Bryce Halloway. I know it in the first eight seconds.
Whoever this woman is, she's been worked on. Cheekbones shaved. A small mole sits behind her left ear in the right spot. Her nose has been thinned. From three feet, in a paparazzi shot, in the wrong light, she would pass.
But her left ring finger has a hairline indent where a ring sat for years. The skin there is one shade paler than the rest.
Bryce Halloway has never worn a ring in her life. Bryce Halloway lives inside a 4K beauty contract — her hands are inspected and color-corrected by a manicurist named Faye every nine days. Bryce Halloway's hands cannot have a ring indent.
I say none of this.
I do what Callum tells me. He points to the camera fisheye in the upper corner of the hallway and I drag a housekeeping cart in front of it at the angle he indicates, until the dead spot covers our path. He knows which angles are dead. He's done this hallway before.
Marco gets there in nine minutes with two men I don't recognize.
He sees me and his face flattens.
"What the fuck is she doing here."
Callum slides his hand into mine.
"She's helping."
"You absolute fucking lunatic. You let a stalker in the door."
Callum looks at me. Not at Marco. Conversational again.
"She won't betray me."
My eyes are wet right on time.
"I won't."
They make me hand over the phone. I unlock it. I open the video file. I drag it to Recently Deleted. I open Recently Deleted. I empty Recently Deleted. I tilt the screen toward Marco so he can watch the empty folder load. He takes the phone from me anyway, scrolls through Files, checks iCloud Photos, checks the burner's secondary gallery app, hands the phone back.
"You weren't here tonight," he says. "Do you understand the word weren't."
I look at Callum. Callum lifts my right hand and turns it palm-up. There's a smear of someone else's blood on the back. He licks his thumb and wipes it off, slow as a parent on a school morning.
"Be a good girl, baby."
I almost laugh. I have to bite the inside of my cheek.
He doesn't know my stud earrings have a sub-gram condenser mic in the left one, broadcasting on a TLS-encrypted link to a numbered AWS bucket I rented in a dead man's name. He doesn't know my phone is set to push every photo and video to three separate cloud accounts at the byte level, on a one-second cron, before the gallery app even renders them. The video he watched me delete is already in Frankfurt.
I have been waiting for this night for six months.
They put her in a black Rimowa rolling suitcase. Hard shell. The largest size. I asked Callum once which luggage brand he travels with and he told me without thinking. Marco zips it.
I wheel it out the rear service exit at 3:14 a.m. Two paparazzi are crouched by the dumpsters because there's a rumor the Olsens are upstairs.
I make sure to keep my head down. Make sure to look guilty. Make sure to slow when one of them stands up.
He raises the camera.
"Quinn? Quinn — you staking out his hotel again, you sick bit—"
The flash punches into my retinas. I do not flinch.
This photo will be the first brick he uses to wall me into a cell.