Chương 2
I told her it was fine until the third apology, when I started crying.
Not because of my hair.
She knew that.
She handed me tissues without pretending otherwise.
Leo arrived three hours later wearing a clean blue polo.
I noticed the shirt before I noticed his face.
He had changed.
While strangers lifted me onto a hospital bed because I could not move my own legs, my husband had showered and changed his clothes.
"Hey," he said.
He leaned down as though he might kiss my forehead, then seemed to reconsider.
"How are you?"
I looked at him.
"What happened to your shirt?"
"What?"
"The gray one."
"I smelled like smoke."
"Oh."
He shoved his hands into his pockets.
"Do they know when you're leaving?"
"I can't walk."
"I know."
"Then probably not tonight."
He exhaled through his nose.
"Mom is devastated."
For a second, I assumed he meant devastated about me.
Then he added, "Everyone thinks the party was a disaster."
There was dried barbecue sauce behind my left ear.
Something inside me became very quiet.
"What did the police ask you?"
His eyes flicked toward the door.
"Nothing important."
"Did they take anything?"
"Why would they?"
"I don't know."
He smiled, but only with his mouth.
"Exactly."
After he left, I asked the nurse for my phone.
I opened our banking app.
The checking account looked normal.
The savings account did not.
Three transfers had been made during the previous four months to an account I did not recognize.
Nine hundred dollars.
Twelve hundred.
Then eighteen hundred.
I took screenshots.
My hands shook badly enough that I had to redo the last one.
A nurse named Camille came in while I was still staring at the screen.
She checked my blood pressure, wrote something on the board, then hesitated.
"Judith, I need to ask you a routine question."
"Okay."
"Do you feel safe at home?"
The answer rose automatically.
Yes.
Leo is stressed.
We argue sometimes.
He would never hurt me.
Instead I heard myself say, "I don't know."
Camille nodded once.
"That's an answer."
She did not ask me to justify it.
That mercy nearly undid me.
The next morning, a neurologist named Dr. Patel explained that imaging had found no spinal injury sufficient to explain the paralysis.
He avoided certainty.
There were more tests.
More blood work.
More waiting.
I asked whether I would walk again.
"We don't know yet."
I hated him for saying it.
Then I hated myself for wanting him to lie.
At eleven seventeen, Detective Elena Ruiz entered my room carrying a dark notebook.
Dr. Patel came with her.
Good news, I discovered, rarely arrives accompanied by a detective.
Dr. Patel pulled the visitor chair closer.
"Your preliminary toxicology results found evidence of repeated exposure to a toxic compound capable of producing neurological symptoms."
My mouth went dry.
"Repeated?"
"Yes."
"How repeated?"
"We can't determine every exposure from one blood sample."
Ruiz spoke then.
"But the pattern doesn't look like a single accidental event."
I stared at the blanket covering legs I still could not feel.
"What compound?"
Dr. Patel gave me the name.
I had never heard it before.
It sounded ordinary enough to belong on a hardware-store shelf.
"Could it be in food?"
"It could enter the body in different ways," he said carefully.
Ruiz opened her notebook.
"We need to talk about your tea."
My phone vibrated on the bedside table.
Leo.
I let it ring.
Ruiz noticed but said nothing.
"Who has access to what you drink at home?"
"My husband."
"Anyone else?"
"Sometimes his mother."
"Does she live with you?"
"No."
"Does she have a key?"
"Yes."
Ruiz wrote that down.
I hated the small relief I felt.
For twelve hours, suspicion had been arranging itself around Leo.
Now there was another possibility, and some pathetic part of me grabbed it.
Freya disliked me.
Freya thought I had made Leo smaller.
Freya had once told him, at our own anniversary dinner, that marriage had turned him into a man who asked permission.
It would have been easier if it were her.
Ruiz's phone buzzed.
She read the screen and stood.
"Excuse me."
Through the glass wall beside the door, two uniformed officers appeared in the corridor.
Leo walked between them.
Freya followed several paces behind.
She was carrying my silver tea tin against her chest.
My grandmother had given me that tin when I was nineteen.
It had once held sewing buttons, then receipts, then loose tea after Leo decided bagged tea tasted like paper.
Ruiz opened the door.
"What's happening?" I asked.
Nobody answered immediately.
Leo saw me.
His expression tightened.
Freya saw me too, and for the first time since the driveway, she looked afraid.
Not for me.
For herself.
One officer handed Ruiz a sealed evidence bag.
Inside was a small handwritten label.
Leo's gaze locked onto it.
Ruiz watched his face before she looked at the bag.
Then she turned to me.
"We found the same compound in your kitchen."
Leo swallowed.
Freya clutched the tea tin harder.
Ruiz continued.
"And someone has already tried to destroy the purchase record."
Leo stopped breathing.
Freya looked at her son.
It was only a glance.
Barely a second.
But mothers spend years learning the faces of their children, and something in hers collapsed before he said a word.
"Leo," she whispered.
He did not look at her.
The detective did.
And from the way Ruiz slowly closed her notebook, I knew that glance had just become part of the case.
Ruiz asked the officers to take Leo and Freya to separate rooms before either of them could say anything else.
Leo found his voice first.
"This is insane."
One officer touched his elbow.
"Sir."
He jerked away from the touch, not violently, but with the offended reflex of a man unused to being handled.
"I live there."
Ruiz stayed between him and my bed.
May you like
"That's why we're talking to you."
Freya looked from the evidence bag to me.
