My Sweet Stalker by Tessa Kelwyn
My Sweet Stalker
Description
She catches men like him for a living. He has been watching her for nine months. Homicide detective Audrey Wilson is dissapointed in men has a secret crush on her sweet neighbor Charlie. He blushes when she greets him. He helps her with anything without being asked. He's the first man in years she has dared to think might actually be decent. And the exact second she lets herself believe a good man like that exists, a stalker walks into her life with bouquets and groceries and the brand of cuffs from her browser history - naming every filthy dark fantasy she would die before admitting out loud.
Chapter 1
Jun 3, 2026
Audrey’s POV
Today is our baby girl Ruby's tenth birthday. Today is supposed to be a good day. Today is also the first time my husband's behavior felt extremely strange from the beginning.
The cake. I needed to remember the cake. Kyle was supposed to pick up the cake.
But Kyle still hadn't texted back about picking it up. And I'd asked him twice. Twice.
Which felt like the bare minimum of reasonable requests to make of a husband when you were pulling a half-shift at a homicide unit and trying to be home in time to hang streamers before your daughter arrived sweaty from soccer practice.
Breath, Audrey. Just breath, no need for a panic mode.
I checked my phone in the precinct bathroom mirror. Still nothing. Just the lock screen photo of Ruby mid-laugh on a soccer field, gap-toothed and objectively feral in the best possible way.
ME: Kyle. The cake. Please.
I sent the third text while the faucet ran and watched myself do it in the mirror. I looked tired. I was always tired. But today was going to be fine — I'd decided it was going to be fine — because I was good at separating things.
Work in one box, Ruby's birthday streamers in another.
I dried my hands and walked back into the fluorescent hum of Halford Police Department's second floor. Sandy was waiting for me with coffee and her disaster face.
"Tell me it's fast," I said, moving around her toward the coffee pot.
"Depends." She followed. "VICAP hit this morning on the Strangler case. We have a suspect in room two, but…"
One hour, I thought. Crack him in one hour, home by four, streamers up by five.
"Give me the file." Sandy was still talking and I caught only pieces — ‘it might be harder this time… you should know before you go in… Audrey, wait..! — while I was already skimming intake, already building the approach.
I had a method. I didn't need the commentary track.
"Audrey!"
"I've got it," I said flatly, pushing through the door.
I opened the file and sat down. But the moment I looked up from the file the world stopped. Completely stilled and rearranged around me while horrible understanding crashed over me.
The man sitting in the cuffs across from me was Kyle.
My beloved husband. My child's father.
He looks exactly the way he always looks. Calm. Familiar. Slightly concerned in that low-key, endearing way of his. There is nothing in his face that suggests anything is wrong.
And still he'd killed four women.
With his own hands. With hands that brushed my daughter’s hair back while taking her to bed. With hands that know my own body better than anyone else.
That is what sends the cold straight through me. How much he looks like my husband, because he is my husband. Sitting in my interrogation room, looking at me the way he looks at me over breakfast.
I watch the recognition move across his face and then go still. He arranges his expression into something careful, something that was already waiting.
The next forty minutes are the most precise work I have ever done. I follow every thread he leaves. I note every pause he manufactures. Around minute twenty-two he leaned forward slightly, and his voice did the thing when he spoke. The Sunday morning ‘don't get up yet’ thing. Softens.
"You don't have to do this…"
It kills me. It gutching my insides to hear that exact same gentle tone. The one he used when Ruby was a newborn and I hadn't slept in four days and he sat on the bathroom floor next to me and said ‘I've got her. Go rest, honey.’
But I force myself to keep my face still. Even if it costs me more than I will ever say.
"Kyle." I said flat and precise. "Did you know Sarah Ellerton?"
"Audrey." My name in his mouth the way it always is. His eyes move over my face with an expression so fluent in concern it should have an Emmy. "You look exhausted, sweetheart."
That one. That was the line that burrowed in and stayed.
Not the confession he half-gave at minute thirty-four. Not the way he looked at me when they led him out — just that. Tender. Wifely. The most intimate kind of cruelty, dressed up as concern.
You look exhausted, sweetheart.
Said the way a husband says it. Said by a man who thought he could still reach me. By a man who…
BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEP.
The alarm doesn't wake me. It ambushes me.
6:42 punches through the dark and I'm already upright, already moving, the apology spilling out before I've located my own feet. "Ruby, baby, I know! Four minutes, just give me four minutes, I'm so sorry, I know you have…"
What does she have? What does she have today?
The recital… No, that was March. The dentist? No, that's Thursday.
I run the calendar in my head. Monday. She has… something. Something I wrote on the whiteboard and then erased because I needed the space for a case timeline. Something important.
I'm in the hallway before I'm fully conscious, another apology already assembled, and I hit the doorway of Ruby's room and stop. Her bed made, cleats gone, lamp off.
Right. She's at my mother's. Has been since Friday.
The tournament was Saturday when I worked. I sent a voice message that started confident until it didn’t, and my mother texted back ‘she understands, Audrey’ in the tone of a woman who absolutely did not mean that.
I stand there while my heart rate finishes its commute back from panic.
No child is being failed by an overworking and exhausted mother at this specific moment. And in general, in the broader context of promises made and tournaments missed and dinners that came from a bag because I got home at nine and couldn't do better… that's a small victory. Even if it’s another kind of a problem.
But it’s the one I don't have time for on Monday with a full caseload and a recurring dream that has been relitigating the worst day of my life for three years running.
I go shower and the hot water does what hot water does — loosens the knot behind my shoulder blades, quiets the dream-static, returns me to something approximately resembling a person.
I step out at six-forty with a towel barely hanging on and hair dripping down my back, and stop dead in the bathroom doorway.
There’re flowers on my bed.
A dozen white roses wrapped in butcher paper, which given my profession is either deeply ironic or deeply disturbing. I'm leaning toward both.
Someone's been inside my apartment.
I have a secret admirer who has been leaving flowers at my front door. Several months of this. Tulips first, like he was testing the water. Then peonies, because apparently we were progressing. Ranunculus last week—which I had to Google because who the hell sends ranunculus? And the card that always said the same words: Thinking of you.
Sweet. Harmless. The kind of thing that makes you wonder if it's the shy IT guy from the fourth floor finally finding his courage. Romantic, right?
Except this morning he upgrades his game plan to breaking and entering. And those flowers stayed at the door, where flowers belong. These are on my bed, where only I belong.
I crouch and pick up the card with two fingers. Today it was different.
‘I know what you keep in the bottom drawer, naughty girl. Next time you open it — think of me.’
My stomach drops like an elevator with cut cables.
The drawer beside my bed is… I need a second, before I look at it. At the bottom drawer doesn't exist in any version of my life I discuss with other people.
It contains my favorite vibrator, a second toy I bought after a particularly grim February, and a small bottle of the good lubricant. All of it purchased under a name I use for exactly one website and nothing else.
It is the most private square foot I own. The last room in my life that belongs entirely to me — no case files, no Ruby's schedule, no ghost of Kyle. Nothing except what I want and when I want it.
I set the note down slowly and then finally saw a paper bag on my nightstand that wasn't there last night. I open it and find hair ties. The specific Ruby's been declaring unavailable in a twenty-mile radius since September. The notebook she needs for school that I've forgotten to order four times in a row. A pack of the pens she likes.
And another note.
‘Don't worry about her. I've got it handled.’
My Sweet Stalker
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