When Everlee Payne goes to the hospital to identify her nine-year-old daughter’s body, she finds her husband Sebastian holding another woman’s child — wearing a black butterfly hairclip Everlee bought for her own girl. The police call it an accident. Neighbors call her distraught. Everlee calls it murder. As she chases the truth, she overhears late-night parties, secret alliances and a casual cruelty that smells like cover-up. She rigs bugs, follows footsteps, and one by one she executes a justice of her own — a slow, theatrical unraveling modeled on a game they played the night of the funeral. Each killing feels righteous, each carved black butterfly on a victim’s back a promise for her daughter. Then the detective asks a quiet, impossible question: “Ma’am, those people died two years ago.” Black Butterfly Verdict is a taut, psychological crime novel about trauma, unreliable memory, and what revenge looks like when reality fractures. In a coastal New England town where everyone knows your name and your secrets, Everlee’s hunt raises one chilling possibility: maybe she’s been both the victim and the architect of something monstrous. Which part of her is telling the truth — and who will be left to remember?
10 Chapters
