astarion's bhaal babe (wingspan matters)

“After Lauren disappeared, the police and the media saw what they wanted to see: a young, beautiful wife and mother who had married her high school sweetheart and settled in their hometown.
She should have been cable news catnip, the pretty white girl from a good family whom viewers could ogle and pity at the same time.
But this is what I've learned: the dead or missing girl is never the subject of the story. Sometimes she's not even the object. She is the circumstance, the accident, the nexus through which vectors cross. No one really knows her, not even the people who were closest to her in life. She becomes a stranger when you realize that her last moments were incomprehensible, an abyss you can't fathom.”
― Polly Stewart, The Good Ones