Page 117 of Her Ex-Husband's Brother

Did I really want my husband to be poisoning me? What the hell is wrong with me? The sad truth is that the alternative might be that I’m simply losing my mind on top of everything else my body is already doing to me.

Still, I keep it up for eight days. I dump everything he makes and eat in secret after he leaves. I check the footage every single morning like a woman checking lottery numbers she already knows haven’t hit.

Seven mornings of nothing. Each morning I feel more unhinged than the last, wondering if the migraines really are just migraines and grief and stress doing what grief and stress do to a body.

And I’ve built an entire fantasy out of some deep, ugly need to make Jake into a villain dramatic enough to justify how much I’ve already given up to leave him. No, that’s not true. I know he’s not a good man. For what he did to August alone. Everything just feels all twisted up in my head.

This morning is day eight.

My feet drag the whole way to the kitchen. I already know what I’m going to find because I’ve known it seven mornings running. Nothing. A tired woman filming her own empty kitchen, hoping for a monster and finding only a man making coffee.

I pick up the phone. I scrub through the footage on autopilot, barely watching, already composing the message I’ll send August about how I think I need to see an actual neurologist. Maybe this really is just my body falling apart the way it’s threatened to for years?—

And then I gasp when I see him.

Jake, at the counter, glancing once toward the hallway to make sure it’s empty.

Jake, reaching into his jacket pocket.

Jake, tipping something fine and silvery out of a small paper fold into the fresh coffee grounds, stirring it in with two fingers before he sets the tin back exactly where it always sits and starts the pot like it’s any other Tuesday.

The phone slips out of my hand and hits the carpet, the screen still playing, and I sit there on the edge of the bed with my thinned hair and my shaking hands and understand, all at once, with horror too large to fit inside my chest, that I have been right about my husband exactly one time in nine years.

He really is that kind of monster.

THIRTY-ONE

AUGUST

I haven’t even thoughtabout pulling myself out of bed for the day when there’s a pounding at the door.

It takes me a second to come to and remember where the hell I am. I sit up, expecting to duck my head for the shelf I installed over the headboard back in the RV.

But instead of my dark, cozy little haunt, light pours in through four windows of a bright rental bedroom, and the pounding at the front door gets more insistent.

Shit.

Did Jake learn I’m here somehow?

I stumble to my feet and head for the door. At this point, a confrontation with the bastard would almost feel good, after weeks of him quietly torturing Lennon.

Even if it is just stress, and she keeps trying to put on a good face in chat, I can tell she’s suffering?—

I yank the front door open.

Instead, it’s Lennon herself. Except she looks like absolute hell. She’s stooped over like she’s barely managing to stand up,clinging to a big backpack that looks too heavy for her, with hollowed-out, bruise-dark shadows under her eyes.

“Oh my god!” I yell, reaching for her just in time for her to collapse into my arms.

What did he do to her? I knew I should never have let her go back in my house. Oh my god, I pull back to look at her face because I need to convince myself she’s still breathing. “Lennon! Len!”

“You were right,” she breathes out weakly in relief against my chest. “Too dangerous. The bastard’s been poisoning me this entire time. We’ve got to go to the cops. I need you to drive me.”

Hepoisoned?—

“We’ve got to get you to the hospital,” I choke out. She’s in my arms and she’s alive and that’s the only fact I can hold onto right now or I will quite literally lose my mind.

“After,” she says, and I can tell she’s fighting to make her voice firm in spite of her physical weakness.