Novels by Poison Ivy

I read Tobias Kern's name three times before I closed the laptop.Then I opened it right back up again.I typed his name into the search bar and let the results load, page after page of him spilling out across the screen. Ten films in eight years. I stared at that number longer than it deserved.Ten.His name sat beneath film posters, beside actresses I half recognized, under photographs of men in expensive suits holding champagne glasses like trophies. Producer. Executive producer. Founder. Investor. The kind of titles designed to sound respectable before anyone thought to ask what they actually meant in practice.I clicked through the films one by one. Small productions, mostly. Independent dramas, a couple of quiet romances, one or two thrillers that never seemed to have found an audience. And almost every single cast list followed the same quiet pattern once I started looking

I spent two weeks studying my husband like a hostile takeover.Not stalking. Research. There was a difference, and I was going to need that difference later, if anyone ever thought to ask.I started with his schedule.Gregory went to the same gym four mornings a week, Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, arriving at exactly six forty and usually gone before eight. Tuesdays were for breakfast meetings, always at the same hotel restaurant near his office. Fridays belonged to the Hale Foundation, or whichever charity event handed him the best lighting for photographs.I wrote all of it down. Restaurants he favored. Boards he sat on. Investors he courted over expensive dinners. The routes his driver took through the city, the same four or five patterns rotating depending on the day. The names of people who regularly sat at his table, and just as importantly, the names of people who used to and didn't anymore.He had always hated being interrupted mid

I couldn't sleep that night.Every time I closed my eyes, I saw him again. Stepping out of that car. Looking up at the house like a man who'd never once done anything worth losing sleep over. That smile, easy and untouched by three years of anything.The same man. The same house. The same smile.Except I wasn't his wife anymore.I was dead. According to the law, anyway.I gave up on the bed around midnight and went to sit at the small kitchen table instead, because lying there staring at the ceiling had stopped being useful hours ago. My body needed something to do, some small physical task to anchor the storm still spinning through my chest.An old electric bill sat on the counter, Vivienne's name printed across the top in blocky, impersonal type. I flipped it over. The back was blank.I found a pen in the drawer beside the sink and sat back down.If I was going to survive this, actually survive it, and not just exist in this

The car stopped in front of the townhouse.I knew it before the door even opened.I ducked behind a delivery truck parked at the curb, my pulse hammering somewhere up near my throat, and told myself it was just a black sedan, the kind half of Manhattan's wealthy husbands drove home in every single day. Nothing special about it. Nothing worth this reaction.The driver's door opened first. A man in a dark suit came around to the back and pulled the rear door open with the kind of practiced ease that meant he'd done it a thousand times before for the exact same passenger.Then he stepped out.Gregory.My husband.Alive.For one ridiculous, unforgivable second, I forgot every single thing he'd done to me. I forgot the tea, the shovel, the soil, the patience on his face while I died in front of him. I just saw him, whole and breathing and impossibly familiar, and something in my chest reached for him before my brain could stop it.

I told myself I was only going for a walk.That was the lie I fed myself the whole way down the hospital corridor, past the nurses' station, out through the sliding doors and into air that felt too big after days of recycled hospital breath. I told it to myself again on the sidewalk, and again at the corner, right up until my feet turned onto a street I hadn't consciously decided to walk toward at all.Seventy-Fourth Street.My old home.I left before I could talk myself out of it, before Nora came back with coffee and asked where I was going, before some sensible version of myself could point out how insane this was. Fourteen blocks stood between the hospital and the life I'd lost, and I walked every single one of them like my body already knew the way even though this body had never once set foot on that sidewalk before.I wasn't going to knock. I wasn't going to go inside. I wasn't even going to get close enough for anyone to notice me.I

Nora was eating cold noodles straight out of the container when she mentioned him, like it was nothing, just casually"You had a fan, you know," she said between bites. "A weird one."I looked up from the magazine still open in my lap, the one with Gregory's face pressed against my grave. "A fan?""Mm hmm." She set the container down on the little rolling table beside my bed. "Used to sit in the last row.""Of what?""Every show you did."I stared at her. "Every single one?""Every single one," Nora confirmed, twirling her fork like this was a fun piece of trivia and not something that made the hair on my arms rise. "The community theater thing sophomore year, that awful student film festival, even the industrial safety video you did for that insurance company. Which, by the way, I will never let you live down.""He watched the safety video?""He watched everything," she said. "Never missed a single performance, as