Your Biggest Fan

Description

The star gets the photo in the mail a few days after the funeral. It’s their mother, or their brother, or their kid — posed, lit, professional. Signed across the bottom in a careful hand: Your biggest fan.

When you’re famous, people send you things. Actress Vivienne Cross learned long ago to let her assistant open the parcels, the love letters and the lewd ones and the locks of stranger’s hair. Then her sister doesn’t return a call, and a glossy eight-by-ten arrives, and Vivienne understands that some fans don’t want a piece of you. They want to give you something that can never be taken back.

Across the city, other names are getting their own portraits — a chart-topper, a quarterback, a senator’s telegenic son — each one’s family thinned by one, each one handed a beautiful image of the loss with an autograph where the killer’s love should be. Detective Aldo Reyes works the connection nobody wants public, because going public is exactly what the fan is starving for. Vivienne refuses protection. She has a premiere to attend, and she’s certain he’ll be in the crowd, and she wants to look him in the eye.

Satire with its throat cut, this one skewers celebrity and the strangers who feel owed a piece of it. The horror is intimacy without consent — being adored by someone who’ll prove it over your family’s grave.

Open the envelope. He signed it with love.