Poisoned?

“Is she okay?”

Brittany’s voice, from somewhere above me, sounded more bored than worried.

“She’s fine,” Jeremy said. “She does this.”

I had never done this. Not once. But the room was already sliding sideways, the chandelier above me smearing into a streak of gold, and my knees gave out before I could tell anyone that.

My chest burned like something inside it had cracked wide open. I tried to reach for the nearest chair and missed it completely.

“Isn’t that his secretary? From the scandal?”

Voices gathered over me, whispering fast, the way people whisper when something bad is happening to someone else and they don’t want to miss it. I found Xavier’s face pushing through the crowd right before everything went dark. And just before it did, I saw Victoria’s face clearly.

She wasn’t scared for me.

She was watching like she’d been waiting years to see me hit the floor.

I woke up to beeping. My eyes opened to a white ceiling and a room that smelled like antiseptic. Xavier sat in the chair beside my bed, his tie loose, his shirt wrinkled like he’d slept in it, if he’d slept at all.

“You’re awake.” His shoulders dropped like he’d been holding his breath for hours.

He reached over and adjusted my blanket without asking, tucking it around my shoulder the way you’d do for someone you couldn’t afford to lose. I let him. My whole body still felt like it belonged to someone else, and his hands were the only steady thing in the room.

“What happened to me?” My throat felt like sandpaper.

The door opened before he could answer. A doctor walked in, holding a clipboard, not looking at me directly.

“Mrs. Devonte.” He said my married name carefully. “Your bloodwork came back with something unusual. Something that doesn’t happen by accident.”

“What do you mean, doesn’t happen by accident?”

“I mean someone has been poisoning you.” He said it plainly, like ripping off a bandage fast so it hurts less. “Slowly. Over months, not days.”

The word poisoned didn’t make sense yet. I sat there trying to fit it into my life and it wouldn’t fit anywhere. I thought of every glass of water Jeremy had ever handed me, every plate he’d passed across the table with a smile, and my stomach turned over slow and cold.

“There’s something else.” He hesitated, and that scared me more than anything he’d said so far. “You were pregnant. Early enough you might not have noticed. I’m sorry, Mrs. Devonte. The baby didn’t survive.”

My hand flew to my stomach. I pressed my palm flat against nothing, against a baby I never even knew I was carrying, and my throat closed around a sound I refused to let out in front of a stranger. The tears came anyway, silent, sliding down before I could stop them.

Beside me, Xavier had gone completely still. Not shocked still. Something else. Like a man doing math in his head and not liking the answer twice in a row. He reached over and took my free hand without a word, his thumb moving slowly over my knuckles, and I let him hold it because I didn’t have anything left in me to pull away with.

“How long,” I whispered, “has this been happening to me?”

“Months, at minimum. This wasn’t one dose. It was repeated. Sustained.” His mouth pressed into a thin line. “I’m sorry.”

Months. I thought about every morning I’d blamed on stress, every headache I’d blamed on work, every time I defended Jeremy at breakfast while someone fed me poison in my own kitchen.

“Where’s Jeremy?” I asked.

Xavier’s jaw tightened. He looked out the window instead of at me, and that told me everything his silence wanted to hide. Outside, the sky had gone the flat gray of early evening, and neither of us said anything for a moment too long.

“I’m here,” he said finally, quiet, like it cost him something to admit it mattered. “That has to count for something right now.”

It did. More than I wanted it to.

He left a little while later to get me food, or maybe just to get away from the question written all over my face. I watched the door long after it shut behind him.

When it opened again, it wasn’t him.

Victoria walked in like she owned the room.

“Well.” Her eyes moved over me slowly. “You look terrible.”

“How do you know Brittany?” I didn’t have the strength to ease into it.

Something flickered across her face and vanished. “Small world,” she said, smiling in a way that told me it wasn’t.

“Victoria. What is happening to me?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She smoothed her skirt with both hands, over and over, a movement too careful to be an accident.

“Someone poisoned me. For months.” I watched her face while I said it. “You don’t seem very surprised.”

“Should I be?” The words came out too fast. She caught it a second too late and tried to soften her voice. “It’s horrible. I’m just in shock.”

She wasn’t. Her hands had gone completely still at her sides, and a moment ago they’d been moving nonstop. Hands don’t know how to lie the way a mouth does.

“You used to tell me everything,” I said. “When did that stop?”

“Maybe when you stopped being someone worth telling things to.” She said it lightly, like a joke, but her eyes didn’t smile with the rest of her face.

“I need you to leave,” I said quietly.

“Kara, don’t be dramatic. I only came to check on you.” Her voice pitched higher, sweeter, the way it always did right before she said something cruel wrapped in kindness. “You’ve always had a flair for making things about yourself.”

“Leave, Victoria.”

She left without a single argument, which told me more than anything she could have said out loud. Only once the door clicked shut did my hands finally start shaking, now that no one was left to see it.

I was still shaking when the door opened again, too fast for it to be Xavier back with food.

It was Jeremy.

He hadn’t come once since I woke up. He hadn’t even asked if I was alive. Now here he was, shutting the door slowly behind him, the kind of quiet a person uses when they don’t want anyone outside to hear what happens next.

He didn’t sit down. He stood near the foot of the bed with his hands in his pockets, studying me like I was a problem he hadn’t finished solving yet.

“You look better than I expected,” he said.

“Did you expect me to look worse, or did you expect me not to wake up at all?”

Something flickered across his face, gone before I could name it.

“We need to talk,” he said. “About what the doctor found in your blood.”

His eyes weren’t on my face. They were locked on the chart clipped to the end of my bed, the one still holding my test results.

“How do you already know what’s on my chart, Jeremy?”