Chapter Two
I should’ve stopped the playback.
On screen, Dara laughed against Karl’s mouth and pushed him back a step.
“Quick, he says. You’ve been saying quick for two years.”
Two years.
“I mean it tonight.” Karl’s hands stayed on her waist. “She went to bed early. She’s getting worse.”
“I know she’s getting worse. I dose the tea, remember?” Dara said it the way she’d say I handle the calendar, remember? Light. A little smug. Office banter. “She barely finished half her lunch. It’s slowing things down.”
“Then put it in something she does finish.”
“Bill says we can’t rush it. It has to look like a decline, not an event.
That’s the whole point of him. Clean labs, clean story, sick wife who just kept getting sicker.
” Dara pulled Karl’s shirt out of his waistband while she talked, fingers working, voice bored.
“He told her the panel came back normal. She believed it. She always believes it.”
“Is he holding up? He sounded shaky on the phone.”
“He’s fine. He’s Bill. He panics on Tuesday and cashes the check on Friday.
” Dara shrugged. “He asked me again what happens after. I told him what I always tell him. After all, he’s the loyal family doctor who did everything he could, and his loans are gone, and nobody ever looks at him twice, because nobody ever looks twice at the doctor. ”
“And you? Anyone looking at you?”
“Karl. I’ve been her best friend for thirty years. When it happens, I’ll cry at the service, I’ll organize the flowers, I’ll help you sort her things, and every person in that room will say thank God Millie had Dara.”
She said my name the same way she said it to my face. There was no special voice. There was no mask coming off. It was the same voice that asked if I’d eaten my lunch.
“She’s asking Quinn questions,” Karl said. “About the deal structure. About approvals.”
“So, handle Quinn.”
“I can’t handle Quinn while she’s alive and signing things.
That’s the entire problem, Dara. Divorce gets me half of a fortune I can’t touch and a settlement everyone will read about.
A widower gets the estate, the sympathy, and the company.
The board already likes me better than they like her.
They think she’s a shut-in who draws elves. ”
“She’d hate that you called Pip an elf.”
“She’d hate a lot of things.”
Dara laughed, and then Karl kissed her, and the tablet slid out of her hand onto my worktable, onto my drawings, and they stopped talking about killing me and started pulling each other’s clothes off in the room where I’d built Pip’s whole world.
I watched all of it. I didn’t know why. Maybe I needed the whole shape of the wound so no one could ever tell me I’d misread it.
He bent her over my worktable. Her hand flattened on the Luma drawing for balance and dragged it sideways, and afterward he smoothed the paper flat again, careful, and squared its corners with the table edge, because Karl liked things to look right.
Then they fixed their clothes, Dara checked her hair in her phone, and they left my studio one at a time. The camera went on recording the empty room until I walked into frame hours later in my socks to get a sketchbook.
The playback caught up to the present. The live image was just me, standing at the monitor, one woman alone in a bright room in the middle of the night.
My legs were shaking. I made myself notice that, because my body had gone strange and far away, and the shaking was the only part that felt like mine.
My husband and my best friend were poisoning me.
My doctor was helping them lie about it.
The tea was by my plate every evening because Dara made it herself.
The supplements were in my drawer because Dara filled the drawer.
The tests were normal because Bill, Dara’s brother and my doctor, wrote the word normal on them.
I had drunk the tea tonight. Karl had handed it to me himself and watched me finish it with that patient smile.
I got to the studio sink before I threw up.
I stood over it after, gripping the edge, and ran the past year back through my head, and every piece of it turned into what it had really been.
The tingling hands. The aching legs. The hair on the pillow.
Fragile Millie. Burned-out Millie. Millie who always believed it.
Anger arrived then, and I was grateful for it, because anger could move me. Grief held me still.
I rinsed my mouth and went back to the camera.
First: the file. If they knew this recording existed, it would stop existing, and then I’d be a sick woman with a wild story, exactly the character they’d spent a year writing me into.
I exported the raw footage to the local drive.
Then to my backup drive. Then I logged into the cloud account Karl and Dara didn’t know about, the private one from before there was staff in my life, and I uploaded the whole file and stood there watching the progress bar crawl while I listened for footsteps in the house.
The upload finished. I checked it, played ten seconds from the middle to make sure the audio survived. Dara’s voice came out of the speaker, small and clear: “I dose the tea, remember?”
I copied the file link, put it in a draft email addressed to no one, and saved the draft.
Then I sat down on my studio floor with my back against the flat file drawers. I looked at my phone, and I understood something that hurt almost as much as the video. I had no one to call.
Not my family. They’d stopped being my family the year the first book hit, when my mother’s voice went sweet and my brother discovered he’d always believed in me and everyone’s love arrived with an invoice.
I’d cut them off, and Karl had held me while I cried about it, and Dara had said, “You don’t need them, you have us”.
They’d made themselves my whole world. I’d let them. It had felt like being loved.
I had a lawyer, but he was the company lawyer, and Karl golfed with him. I had a doctor. He was mentioned as an accomplice in the video. I had a manager, business partners, a staff. Every one of them reached me through Dara, was scheduled by Dara, was charmed at parties by Karl.
I scrolled my contacts twice, top to bottom, and the only name that didn’t route back to my own house was Nick Quinn.
It was two in the morning. He was the producer of a movie worth more money than I could count.
We’d known each other eighteen months, argued about mirror scenes, agreed about voice actors, and once spent an entire dinner meeting talking about Luma’s ears.
He noticed when I sounded sick. He was the only one who ever pushed back when I said I was fine.
It wasn’t much to bet a life on. It was what I had.
He answered on the second ring, awake-sounding in that fast, alarmed way.
“Millie?”
“I need you to listen to something,” I said, “and I need you to not talk until it’s done.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it. If you talk, I’ll lose my nerve, and I can’t lose my nerve, because I don’t have another version of this call in me.”
“I’m not talking,” Nick said. “Go.”
I put the phone on speaker, set it next to the monitor, and played it for him.
Karl’s voice. Dara’s voice. The tea. Bill.
The clean labs. Widower. The board likes me better.
I watched the progress bar move under the video instead of watching the video again, and I listened to Nick Quinn’s breathing change on the other end of the line.
When it reached the point where the talking stopped, I paused it.
“There’s more,” I said. “The more is them having sex on my worktable. I’ll spare us both.”
Nick was quiet for a second. When he spoke, his voice had gone very level, a voice I’d never heard him use before.
“Where are you right now?”
“My studio. Everyone’s asleep.”
“Are you safe tonight? Answer that first.”
The question undid me a little. Not are you sure, not there must be some mistake, not maybe you misheard. Are you safe.
“I think so,” I said. “They need it slow. It has to look like a decline, not an event.” My voice cracked in half on the word event. “That’s a quote, Nick. That’s a quote about me.”
“I believe you,” he said.
Three words, and I had to press the back of my hand against my mouth and breathe through it, because I realized I’d braced for the other thing. For it’s all in your head. For Millie, you’ve been under so much stress.
“Here’s what we’re not going to do,” Nick said.
“We’re not going to confront anyone. Not tonight, not tomorrow.
You have the only honest recording in that house, and the second they know it exists, you go from the woman with proof to the sick wife having an episode, and they’ve already got a doctor ready to sign that story. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Don’t drink anything you didn’t buy. Don’t eat anything she touched. Tomorrow, you smile at both of them the way you did yesterday.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“You can, because you did it yesterday, and the only thing that’s changed is that now you know the truth, and they don’t know you know it.”
“Nick, they’re going to hand me food tomorrow. Tea. He watches me drink it. What am I supposed to do, spit it in a plant?”
“Stomach bug,” he said. “You’ve been sick for a year, so nobody blinks if you’re sicker this week. Push food around your plate. Carry the tea to another room and dump it. You’re allowed to be nauseous, Millie, you’ve earned it.”
A short, horrible laugh got out of me. “That might be the first useful thing anyone’s said about my health in a year.”
“I’m going to say one more useful thing, and then I want you to try to sleep, because tomorrow you have to have a normal face.” He exhaled. “Before anything else, before you tell one more living soul, you need a lawyer. Not your lawyer. Not anyone Karl has ever bought a drink. Your own.”
“I don’t know how to find someone like that. Everyone I know, they know first.”
“I know someone they don’t,” Nick said. “Her name is Beatrice Tanner. She handled a situation for a friend of mine, an estate fight that had a criminal case folded inside it, and she took the whole thing apart without ever raising her voice. I’ll call her the second her office opens.”
“Nick.” I stared at the drawing on my worktable, at the corner Karl had squared. “Why are you doing this? It’s two in the morning and I’m a work call.”
He was quiet for a second. “You’re not a work call,” he said. “Get some sleep.”