My Husband and My Best Friend Tried to Poison Me (Wives Who Bite Back #22)

Chapter One

The pencil kept slipping.

I set it down, flexed my fingers, and picked it back up.

On the camera monitor, my own hand looked steady enough.

That was the strange part. On screen, I looked like an artist at work.

My fingers buzzed and stung, and my grip kept loosening on its own, and I had to stop every few minutes and pretend I was studying the drawing instead of waiting for my hand to obey me again.

I was recording a drawing session for the archive.

We filmed most of my sessions now, partly for the documentary footage the studio wanted, partly because I liked having a record of how a piece grew.

Today’s piece was Luma, mid-turn, looking back at Pip through a doorway made of roots.

The animation team needed reference for how I drew her movement, the weight of her, the way her fur fell around her shoulders.

I loved this drawing. I hated my hands.

“Come on,” I said to my fingers, quietly, because the camera picked up sound too. “One clean line. That’s all I’m asking.”

I got the line. Then I got three more, and for a little while, I was lost in the work and forgot to feel sick.

That still happened sometimes. The world could be falling apart, my stomach could be a knot, my scalp could ache in that deep, wrong way it had lately, and Nivrenna would still open its door and let me in.

My phone lit up on the worktable. Nick Quinn.

I set the pencil down, wiped the graphite off my hand, and answered.

“Tell me the casting news is good,” I said.

“The casting news is good,” Nick said. I could sense he was smiling. “The other news is that the script team wants to cut the mirror scene in act two, and I told them I’d rather cut the script team.”

“You didn’t.” I gasped.

“I said it more politely. There were adjectives like ‘valuable’ and ‘collaborative.’” His voice was low and easy, and it made long production calls feel shorter. “But the mirror scene stays. Pip has to see herself in the Glass King’s hall. That’s the whole point of the hall.”

“It’s the whole point of the movie,” I said. “She looks at his version of her and refuses it.”

“That’s what I told them. With fewer words and more producer face.”

I laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough, and I had to put the phone against my shoulder while I got a sip of water. When I came back, Nick had gone quiet.

“Millie.”

“I’m here.”

“You sound worse than last week.”

“I sound like a woman who talks to script teams for a living,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“You said that last time.”

“And it was true last time.” I picked up my pencil again so I’d have something to do with my hand. “Karl thinks it’s burnout. Dara thinks it’s burnout. My doctor ran tests and said everything’s normal, so it’s official. I’m just tired.”

“Tired doesn’t usually last this long,” Nick said. I could hear the concern in his voice.

“It does when you build a fantasy empire and then sell it to Hollywood.”

He let it go, but he let it go the way people did when they chose not to argue, not when they were convinced.

“Casting,” he said. “Since you won’t talk about your health, let’s talk about Reyes.”

“Did the studio come around?”

“The studio sent me a list of four names, and every one of them opens a movie, and not one of them can do what Reyes did in that read.” Papers moved on his end. “They keep saying she’s not big enough for Luma. I keep saying Luma wasn’t big either until Pip trusted her.”

“You’ve been saving that line.”

“For two weeks. How’d it land?”

“Not bad.” I chuckled. I pulled the Luma drawing closer and looked at her face, mid-turn, the wariness I’d given her before I’d known what it was for.

“Nick, when Reyes read the door scene, I heard her. I’ve had that character in my head since I was in college, and I heard her in the room.

If they cast a famous person doing a voice, the kids will hear a famous person doing a voice. ”

“That’s the other thing I keep telling them.”

“Then tell them the creator has approval and the creator has decided.”

“You sure? Once you invoke it, they’ll remember you invoked it.”

“Let them remember. It’s the one clause I made Karl fight for.” That wasn’t quite right, and I corrected it out loud, because Nick was easy to be honest with. “It’s the one clause I fought for. Karl thought approvals would slow down the money.”

Because my husband always thought about the money first.

Nick paused a beat longer than the sentence needed. “Well,” he said. “Good thing you won.”

Before we hung up, Nick added a casual reminder to scan the movement notes from my sketchbook that night so his team would have them in the morning.

After the call, I felt better than I had all day.

I worked another hour. My hand gave out for good around the time Luma’s tail finally sat right on the page, so I called it.

I stacked the reference sheets, stood up too fast, the room tilted, and I held the edge of the worktable until it stopped.

“Okay,” I said to the empty studio. “Bed.”

Dara knocked on the doorframe before I got there, with her tablet tucked against her hip. She’d been running the practical side of my life since this all started in my twenties.

“Dinner’s ready,” she said. “Karl’s opening the good wine because the licensing call went well. Also, Bill’s office texted me. You’re due for your follow-up.”

“I just did a follow-up.”

“That was the blood panel. This is the review of the blood panel.” She smiled and reached out and tucked a curl behind my ear, the way she’d done since elementary school, since sleepovers, since before Karl, since before any of it. “You look pale, Mills. Did you eat the lunch I left?”

“Most of it.”

“Millie.”

“Half of it. My stomach’s been off.”

“That’s why you take the supplements,” she said. “They don’t work if they’re sitting in the drawer.”

“I know, I know.”

“I made you the evening tea. It’s by your plate.” She looked past me at the drawing on the table, and her face changed into something soft. “Oh, that’s her. That’s exactly her.”

“You think so? Her tail fought me all afternoon.”

“Mills, I’ve watched you draw her since she was a smudge in a sketchbook. That’s her.” She tipped her head at the page. “You used to draw all over my chemistry homework, I got points off, and I kept every page anyway. I still have them somewhere.”

“You do not still have them.”

“I have everything,” Dara said. “Somebody in this operation has to be the archive.”

“The team needs this one by Friday.”

“Then eat first, artist.” She hooked her arm through mine, and I let her lead me out, because that was what we did, because she was my best friend and she kept me running, and I would’ve been lost without her.

***

Dara had gone home for the night, her evening tea already by my plate.

Dinner was Karl in a crisp shirt telling me about the licensing call as if he’d drawn the characters himself.

It was a blessing that my husband was so involved in my work.

Without him and Dara, who was my best friend and my assistant, we wouldn’t have been here.

“The European group wants Pip on a stationery line,” he said. “Notebooks, pencil tins, the whole back-to-school category. I told them yes on the condition that we control the art direction, because the last thing this brand needs is a licensee who thinks Pip is cute.”

“Pip is a little cute,” I said.

“Pip is beloved. There’s a difference, and the difference is worth about forty percent on the royalty rate.

” He cut his food into neat squares while he talked.

“They pushed back, I mentioned the movie, they stopped pushing back. Honestly, the movie announcement has changed every conversation I’m in. People take my calls differently now.”

“Your calls,” I said, and I smiled when I said it, because we’d worn this argument so smooth it had become a joke.

“Our calls. The empire’s calls.” He raised his glass an inch toward me. “You draw the doors, I guard them. It works, doesn’t it?”

That wasn’t fair, how he said it, and I corrected it in my head the way I always did.

Karl handled the business because I couldn’t, because contracts made my eyes cross, because he was good at it and proud of it, and he’d held my hand at every signing since the first book sold.

He poured my wine, and when I said my stomach was off, he took the glass back without a word and slid me the tea Dara had left instead.

He watched me drink it with a small, patient smile.

“You’re pushing too hard,” he said. “The movie will still be there if you rest.”

“The movie is why I can’t rest.”

“Nick Quinn can wait a week for his sketches.”

“They’re not his sketches. They’re mine.”

Karl’s smile stayed intact. “Of course they are,” he said, and topped off his own glass. “That’s what I keep telling everyone. Everything is Millie’s.”

I went to bed early. My legs ached in their bones, and I lay there doing the math I always did before sleep.

Tired plus stomach, plus tingling hands, plus the hair I kept finding on my pillow, divided by normal test results, multiplied by three people telling me I was fine.

It always came out the same. Burnout. Stress.

Fragile Millie, working herself sick over drawings of a little girl who finds doors.

It took me until I was half asleep to remember the sketchbook. The Luma reference had my movement notes for the animation team in the back, and I’d promised Nick I’d scan them tonight so his team had them in the morning. I groaned, got up, and padded through the dark house to the studio wing.

The studio door was shut. I never shut it.

I opened it, flipped the lights, and grabbed the sketchbook off the worktable, and I was already turning back toward the door when I saw the small red light on the camera rig.

Still recording.

“Great,” I muttered.

Hours of empty studio footage to trim. I pulled the monitor toward me and scrubbed backward through the timeline to find where my session ended, watching the little preview window, looking for the moment I stood up and walked out of frame.

I found myself standing up. I found myself leaving. I kept my thumb on the dial and scrubbed forward from there at speed, empty room, empty room, empty room.

Then the studio door opened on screen, and Karl walked into my frame.

I stopped scrubbing. The timestamp put this deep into the evening, long after I’d gone up to bed. Karl never came into my studio. He called it the workshop and made a joke of wiping charcoal off his hands whenever he’d so much as touched the doorframe.

Dara came in behind him and shut the door.

I stood there in my own studio, in the middle of the night, holding a sketchbook against my chest, watching my husband and my best friend stand close together in the room where I’d built my whole world.

On the little screen, Karl reached out and pulled Dara in by the waist, and she went, easy, familiar, practiced.

I turned the audio on.

“We have to be quick,” Karl said.