Chương 3
“They won’t believe me.”
“They’re taking the bottle.”
“That’s not what I said.”
Nathan waited.
She turned her head toward him.
“You didn’t believe me at first.”
“I did.”
“No.”
“Sophie—”
“You looked at the bottle. Then you looked at her.”
“I was trying to understand what happened.”
“You were deciding.”
He felt something defensive rise in him.
“You were barely conscious.”
“I was conscious enough.”
The paramedic looked deliberately at a cabinet.
Nathan lowered his voice.
“I’m not fighting with you in an ambulance.”
Sophie closed her eyes again.
“Convenient.”
He almost answered.
Then the rear doors opened.
The hospital took Sophie away from him behind a set of double doors.
Nathan was directed to registration.
There was something degrading about filling out an insurance form while your wife was being evaluated for possible poisoning. Not morally degrading. Practically degrading. The world insisted on continuing in forms, signatures, identification cards, questions about emergency contacts.
A woman at the desk asked whether Sophie still lived at the address on her driver’s license.
“Yes.”
“Any change in marital status?”
Nathan looked at her.
“No.”
She clicked something.
“Employer?”
“She’s self-employed.”
“What kind of work?”
He paused.
“Sophie runs a nonprofit foundation.”
The woman waited for a more useful answer.
Nathan gave her the foundation’s name.
His phone was still with the police.
Without it, his hands felt unemployed.
He sat in a waiting area and stared at a vending machine that contained six varieties of crackers and no water.
A television mounted in the corner played a cooking competition with the sound off. Someone had turned on captions. A contestant was explaining that his sauce had split.
Nathan watched the sentence repeat in his head.
MY SAUCE HAS SPLIT.
He almost laughed.
Instead he rubbed both hands over his face.
A nurse called his name.
The physician who spoke to him did not offer certainty. Sophie was stable. Her vital signs had improved. Initial screening suggested she had taken more of a sedating prescription medication than expected, but the hospital would need more specific testing and a clearer medication history.
“Could one extra pill do this?” Nathan asked.
“It depends on the medication, the strength, her body, what else is in her system, whether the tablets are actually what the label says. There are too many variables for me to tell you that yet.”
“Could someone switch pills?”
The doctor looked at him.
“Yes.”
“Would you know?”
“Potentially. If law enforcement submits the tablets for testing, that’s one path. We can also compare what’s in her blood with what she’s prescribed.”
“How long?”
“For some results, hours. For others, longer.”
Nathan looked through the small window in the door behind her.
“Can I see her?”
“In a minute.”
When he entered Sophie’s room, she was awake.
Her hair spread darkly across the pillow. Without makeup, under hospital lighting, she looked younger than twenty-eight and far more exhausted.
Nathan sat beside her.
For several seconds neither of them spoke.
Then Sophie said, “My bag.”
“What?”
“My bag was in the entryway.”
“At home?”
“Yes.”
“What about it?”
“My laptop.”
Nathan leaned forward.
“What about your laptop?”
She looked at him.
“She was trying to get into it.”
“When?”
“Before I went down.”
“What do you mean, went down?”
“I didn’t just collapse the second she walked in.”
Nathan waited.
Sophie swallowed.
“She was already there when I came home. I thought you’d let her in.”
“I didn’t.”
“She knows the code.”
“No, she had a guest credential. I canceled those last month when we changed the system.”
Sophie frowned.
“She was inside.”
Nathan sat back.
For the first time since the ambulance, he felt cold.
“Tell me exactly what happened.”
Sophie stared toward the curtain.
“I came home early because the meeting ended. She was in the kitchen.”
“Doing what?”
“Making tea.”
“Vanessa was making tea in our apartment?”
“I asked her the same thing.”
“What did she say?”
“That I’d texted her.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
Sophie turned her eyes toward him.
Nathan stopped.
“Sorry.”
She looked away again.
“She had this whole expression. You know the one.”
“I know several.”
“The concerned one.”
Nathan knew exactly which expression Sophie meant.
Vanessa had a way of narrowing her eyes gently when someone spoke to her about something difficult. It made people feel listened to. Nathan had seen donors tell her about divorces, miscarriages, bankruptcies, addictions, estranged children.
He had once called it her superpower.
Sophie said, “She asked if I’d been sleeping. She asked whether I’d talked to Dr. Patel. Then she said maybe I should lie down.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You weren’t feeling sick?”
“Not then.”
“What did you take?”
“My four o’clock pill.”
“From the bottle?”
“Yes.”
“Did she hand it to you?”
“No. It was on the counter.”
“Is that normal?”
Sophie looked at him.
“No, Nathan. Usually my medication doesn’t wander into the kitchen by itself.”
He ignored the edge in her voice.
“What happened next?”
“I took one. We argued.”
“About what?”
Sophie was quiet.
Then she said, “The foundation.”
Nathan stared at her.
“What about it?”
She rubbed her thumb against the hospital blanket.
“I found something.”
“How long have you known?”
“Two days.”
“And you didn’t tell me?”
“I was going to.”
“When?”
“When I knew what it was.”
“What was it?”
She closed her eyes.
“Payments.”
“To whom?”
“I don’t know exactly. That was the problem.”
Nathan’s irritation arrived before compassion could stop it.
“You found unexplained payments involving Vanessa and decided to confront her alone?”
“I didn’t confront her. She was in my kitchen.”
“You should’ve called me.”
“And said what? ‘Hi, Nathan, your wife found six invoices she doesn’t understand, please send the cavalry’?”
“If you suspected Vanessa—”
“I didn’t suspect Vanessa.”
“You just said—”
“I said the payments involved accounts she supervised. I thought there was a bookkeeping problem.”
May you like
Nathan stood and walked two steps toward the window.
There was no view from this room, only another wing of the hospital and a strip of pale sky.
