Chapter 59 Sara Batcher
Sara Batcher
“When a patient mixes a depressant with another depressant, they’re not doubling down—they’re risking death and playing Russian roulette with a full chamber.”
Sara dressed in the same black pantsuit she had worn for the closing of InkRose.
She straightened her hair with a hot iron and put on makeup, taking extra care with the eyeliner, and grabbed the keys to the Aston Martin.
The end result was that of a confident woman, one who could take on anything that was thrown at her.
Inside, she felt as if she was on the verge of breaking.
What she wanted to do, more than anything, was retreat upstairs to her bedroom, order in Thai food, and gorge herself until she passed out dead asleep.
But that plan, according to Ian, was the wrong one.
His stance was that the toxicology report wasn’t going to go away.
They needed to get ahead of it, and there was only one way to do that.
Tell the truth, or at least some of it. Share his abuse of lorazepam and Vicodin and admit her part in the former.
She parked in a spot on the far end of the lot, away from the other cars.
The Aston had been a stupid decision, and she considered returning home and borrowing Maggie’s Nissan hybrid.
Then again, it wasn’t like the detectives would see what she drove here, and it wasn’t as if the detectives didn’t know she was rich.
If the worst outcome of her transportation choice was some scratches or a theft attempt, so be it.
At this point, the distraction would be welcome.
She engaged the emergency brake and unbuckled her belt. She watched through the front windshield as a squirrel ran along the top of the security fence. She checked her watch, then her phone. Ian had texted her eight minutes ago.
Ten Minutes Out.
She dropped her head back against the headrest. Ian had to get her out of this. What was the point in paying an attorney’s exorbitant rates if he couldn’t make things like this go away?
Things like this. She hated herself for saying that.
David hadn’t been a thing, his death wasn’t a thing .
. . but if she thought of him as a person, she’d fall apart before she even made it through the station doors.
Already, she could feel her composure cracking, and Ian had told her to be strong.
Just tell them what happened. The good, the bad, and the ugly.
There was no way she could tell all the ugly, but she’d do her best with the bad.
The ugly was between her, David, and God.
She closed her eyes and remembered that last morning.
She hadn’t known that it would be the last time she’d ever see him.
She had just known that it was Saturday and she had things to do, and he was just sitting at the dining room table in his underwear, staring blankly at the wall before him.
“I’m leaving you,” he’d announced, as if she cared. As if that were a bad thing.
She’d ignored the statement and jabbed the scoop into the protein powder, taking an extra-generous amount and pouring it into the blender, on top of the ice.
She would have loved for David to leave her, but as much as he hated her in the mornings, he clung to her just as fiercely in the evenings. His love and hatred were on a regular cycle that was 100 percent based on his level of medication or withdrawal.
The problem was that she didn’t have an ebb and flow. She only had the ebb, an ebb of affection that was retreating further and further from him with each new day.
She’d watched as he reached for his pills and dumped the bottle on the table, then arranged the pills in a long line in front of him, treating each white tablet as if it was precious.
“Do you know why I’m leaving you, Sara?” he’d asked in a singsong voice, and she could anticipate the next three hours.
Cruelness. Mocking. Then anger. Maybe a few rage-outs.
He’d try to wait as long as he could before he took the pills, savoring the anticipation of the high and making sure that it would last well into the night.
Then euphoria. He’d apologize. Love-bomb her.
Talk a mile a minute about the stupidest things.
Call everyone in his phone. Eat. Drink. Laugh.
Then the downward spiral, until around dinnertime, when he would re-dose and repeat.
She couldn’t deal with it. Not on that day, when she had her own things to do and didn’t feel like dealing with a roller coaster of hell.
She’d eyed the clock and stuck her hand in her bathrobe pocket, pulling out two lorazepams and dropping them into the blender.
She’d unscrewed the top to the macadamia milk and poured it in, then capped the lid and pressed the button.
The lorazepams had been guaranteed to put him in a coma until early afternoon and get him through his bitchy spell. She hadn’t cared if that kept him up all night, because she could always just hit him with another dose then if she needed to.
Would the police understand her drugging her husband?
Probably not, not unless they had their own addict for a spouse, or a child, or a parent.
But if Ian had said that she should tell it, she would.
She could keep the ugly part of it to herself.
The ugly was that every time she dosed him, she prayed that he’d alter his schedule and take a pill early and that the combination would trigger a reaction and he’d die.
The ugly was that for the last two years of their marriage, she’d been rooting for that outcome.
The ugly was, when he disappeared, she’d taken a moment to celebrate that it might have actually happened.
The ugly was that maybe it had.