My Lovely Wife

I find the tablet in Kekona’s dining room, on a table large enough to seat sixteen. It seems like a perfect place to sit down and go through the tablet again. I check each site, looking for something about torture and strangulation. I look for hot water burns and oil burns and internal bleeding and cuts on eyelids. I even look for cigarette burns, which is absurd, because Millicent refuses to be near cigarettes.

And I find nothing.

She looked at how long it takes for a sprained wrist to heal. She also searched for a variety of information about upset stomachs—what caused them and what to do about them.

That was it.

Nothing about torture, nothing helpful. I should have known better.

I shove the tablet away, and it skids. My immediate reaction is to check and see if I scratched Kekona’s dining room table. As if it matters, but I do it anyway. I stand up and look straight down at it, running my finger across the wood, when something on the tablet screen catches my eye.

It is still on the page about upset stomachs. On the right-hand side, there is a list of possible causes. One of them is purple instead of blue, because the link has been clicked.

Eye drops.

Sixty-eight

Tetrahydrozoline is the active ingredient in eye drops that gets rid of red eyes. Swallowing a large amount can cause serious problems. The drops lower blood pressure and can put someone into a coma. Or kill them.

But swallowing a small amount causes an upset stomach and vomiting. No fever.

The eye drops belong to Millicent.

She has been giving them to Jenna.

No.

Impossible.

The thought makes me physically ill. Jenna is our child, our daughter. She is not Lindsay or Naomi. She is not someone to torture.

Or maybe she is. Maybe Jenna is no different. Not to Millicent.

My daughter does not have a recurring stomach problem.

She has a mother who is poisoning her.

* * *

• • •

I want to kill Millicent. I want to go to my house, kill my wife, and be done with it. I am that angry.

This feeling is different. Before, I never actually thought, “I want to kill a woman” or even “I want to kill this particular woman.” My desire wasn’t that clear, that succinct. It was about Millicent, about the two of us, and what I wanted out of it was more complex.

Now it is simple. I want my wife to die.

I head for the front door without a hat or a disguise or a weapon of any kind. I am angry and disgusted, and I do not care if I have a plan. My hand is on the doorknob when I realize how stupid I am. How stupid I always am.

I could probably get across Hidden Oaks without being spotted. Most think I’m on the run, not hiding in my own neighborhood. And once I did get all the way to my house, I could get inside, because I have a key. That’s assuming it’s not under surveillance.

On the other side, my wife. Who I now know is a monster.

Just like the real Owen.

Also, my kids. They are in the house, and both believe it is me, not her. I am the monster. And now all I can see is their reaction when I kill their mother.

I do not open the door.

And I do not just need a plan. I need evidence. Because on TV, evidence of me is everywhere.

My DNA. Though it should not be a surprise, Millicent still astonishes me. I have been saying that since I met her.

She managed to get my DNA all over the Bread of Life Christian Church. My sweat is found on the door handle out front, on the lock down to the basement, even on the stair railing. It is like she had a vial of my sweat and dabbed it everywhere.

A spot of my blood is found on the shelves against the wall.

More sweat on the handcuffs.

Blood on the chains and dirt.

She makes it look as if I mostly cleaned up but missed a few spots.

Claire has a midday press conference to announce all of this. I am officially upgraded from person of interest to suspect. The only suspect.

She even says I am “probably armed and definitely dangerous.”

After hours of watching the experts, reporters, and former friends crucify me, I finally leave the house. I drive right out of Hidden Oaks and out into the world, where someone may or may not recognize me.

Across town, I drive by the EZ-Go where I used to get coffee. Instead of stopping, I drive ten miles down the interstate to another EZ-Go, which has the same self-serve machine. With the baseball cap on my head and almost a full week’s growth of facial hair, I go in and get myself a coffee.

The young guy behind the counter barely looks up from his phone. It is almost anticlimactic.

It also emboldens me a little. Every person in the world is not looking for me. I could probably eat in a restaurant, shop at the mall, and see a movie before someone recognizes me. I just don’t want to do any of those things.

Once I am in Hidden Oaks, something makes me drive by my house. The lawn is clear of toys, and the welcome sign on the door is gone. The shades are drawn, and the curtains are closed.

I wonder if Millicent has bought another bottle of eye drops. Or if she even looked for the old one.

I also wonder if Jenna is the only one she poisoned.

I have been sick a few times as well. If Millicent can make her own daughter sick, she is capable of doing it to anyone.

But I do not go inside the house. Not yet. I go back to Kekona’s. The police are not waiting for me, nor have I been followed. Everything inside looks the same.

I almost leave the TV off, to take a break, but I can’t.

Just about everyone is talking about the DNA, and the only exception is Josh. He is back to being a reporter, and he is interviewing a criminal pathologist. This man’s voice is not as irritating, but he is a little boring, like a professor, at least until he gets to the paper cuts on Naomi.

“The locations of the paper cuts are important to determining what caused them. We say ‘paper’ because of the type of cut, but there also different types of paper. For instance, Naomi had shallow paper cuts on tougher skin, like the bottoms of the feet, and deeper cuts in softer areas, like the underside of the upper arm. That indicates that the same item was used, but it couldn’t have been a regular piece of paper. It had to be something that would cut through the heel of a foot.”

I jump off the couch like I’ve been shocked. And in a way, I have. I know what Millicent used to make those cuts.

Sixty-nine

Rarely does Millicent do something by accident. She has a reason for everything, even if it’s to amuse herself.

This is one of those times.

It began so many years ago, when she asked me how I would protect her from assholes on planes who try to pick her up.

I would force them into the center seat, hog the armrests, and give them paper cuts with the emergency information card.

The emergency information card. The one I gave to her on the first Christmas we spent together. She has always kept it.

In her old apartment, it was taped to the mirror in her bathroom.

Our first place together was the small house, a rental, and the card was stuck to the fridge with a googly-eyed face magnet.

When we bought our first house, she slipped it inside the frame of our full-length mirror.

And in our bigger, more expensive house, we have two kids who do not appreciate the emergency-card joke. They think it’s corny. Millicent carries the card with her, stuck inside the visor in her car. When the sun is in her eyes and she flips it down, the card makes her laugh.