Page 67 of Potion Sickness

The bathroom I’m sent to is at the top of the stairs, second door. As I pass the first doorway, I hear Skye’s voice.

“—and it’s going to be okay. I’m going to fix it, okay? I promise. I’ll fix it.”

Fix it? Fix what, Skye? You don’t promise to fix something you didn’t break. The problem is that there’s a lot broken in Damien’s life at the moment. There’s his body, but there’s also his reputation. Did Skye leak the tabloid story? Maybe she built the press kit, and then it blew up bigger and uglier than she planned, and now he’s unconscious and she’s rehearsing an apology for when he wakes up.

I’m so lost in this thought that I almost don’t notice the medicine cabinet is ajar, just slightly. It wouldn’t hurt to open it a little more. It’s already open. Right?

Inside, there’s not much of note. A standard medicine cabinet with all the typical things you’d expect, but there is a days-of-the-week caddy. It’s empty, but not cleaned. Each little well has a sticky ring at the bottom where a bottle stood. The rings come in three shapes: round, square, and narrow, each about the width of a nickel. Monday and Wednesday are round. Tuesday has square. Thursday, narrow. It’s a rotation. Somebody was running a schedule.

Are these his ‘vitamins’?

I close the cabinet, taking care to leave it exactly as far open as it was, and then wash my hands and head back downstairs.

* * *

The kitchen smells like banana bread, of course, but it looks like a juice bar. The refrigerator door is open and Annabel is standing in front of it with Skye. The top two shelves are green bottles.

“You can check all of them,” Skye is saying. “Please. I make them Sundays, for the whole week, he likes them cold. Check every one. I want you to.”

Annabel takes them one at a time. She’s unhurried about it. Even I can smell it, from a distance — kale, apple, ginger, wheatgrass.

“They’re clean,” Annabel says, on the last one. “Juice and nothing else.”

Skye exhales like she’s been holding it for weeks. “Okay. Okay, good. Because I know what people say. That I was giving him something. In the juices. Because I made them, and I’m the girlfriend, and that’s the story, right? It’s always the girlfriend. But there’s nothing in there. You can tell people that. You’ll tell them?”

“I’ll tell them what I found,” Annabel says.

Ms. Carter cuts the loaf. There’s a stretch of kitchen small talk during which I learn the juicer cost more than my first car.

“Can I ask you a work thing?” Skye asks, eventually. “About potions. Do they wear off on their own? Like… fully. If a person took something, and then just... stopped. Does it all go away eventually, or does some of it stay?”

“Depends on the potion,” Annabel says. “Most of them, the body will clear completely. Some leave a residue for a while. A few change things that don’t change back.”

“But his will clear? Whatever is in him? You said he’d burn it off.”

“I think he will.”

* * *

Annabel walks me out to the car, her satchel over her shoulder.

“Thanks for bringing the bag,” she says. “I needed the comparison sample in it. Tiffany’s bottle.”

“And?”

“It’s there. The Glamoury base. It’s obvious he’s been drinking from that catalog for a long time.”

“There’s a caddy in his bathroom with rings from three different bottles. On a schedule.”

“That would do it.” She shakes her head slowly. “He may genuinely have done this to himself.”

“Maybe that solves it then.”

“Maybe.”

“So what’s left?”

“What’s left is whatever that girl in there is hiding,” she says.”She’s carrying something. It’s obvious. And whatever it is, it’s heavy.”