Page 68

VEDA

I’m recounting Sarah’s refill, but the numbers don’t add up. This means her supply runs low four days early. Not enough to mean anyone’s been dosing her wrong. Just enough that I need to know why.

Count again. This makes no sense.

The number doesn’t improve. It’s almost certainly nothing—a pharmacy short-fill, most likely. But Sarah’s whole survival is built on the ordinary being verified, so that’s what I do.

I don’t want to alarm anyone. Diana’s six days out of a hospital bed and Lupo’s carrying something heavy behind his eyes this week. He’s only himself when Sarah’s in the room.

He hasn’t even touched me since the other day in our bedroom. Not since he and Nick talked about whatever is Brancati-shaped that I can’t know about.

I wish he would confide in me. It’s not as if I scare easily—for fuck’s sake, the man stole me across an ocean, and I’m still here. What is it that he cannot trust me with?

But when I started to ask him about it, Nick interrupted, and that was that. I’m feeling less like an idiot about the whole thing—the man’s life is based on secrecy and crimes. I know that much. It’s not like he’s used to opening up to people.

Just wish he would with me.

So I focus on what I can control, and that’s medicine. I will go to the estate office to pull the pharmacy paperwork myself from Sarah’s folder, find the reorder date, and confirm nobody on our end fumbled a refill. That will put my mind at ease before I make it anyone else’s problem.

The office is Lupo’s, where all of the household paperwork lives—invoices, staff schedules, the boring machinery of a large estate. The pharmacy file should be in the cabinet with the other medical records, the ones I set up myself in my first week, alphabetized, because I needed to be able to find Sarah’s med schedule in an emergency. It’s one of the first things I fixed here.

But her folder isn’t where I left it.

Probably thanks to Diana reorganizing during her convalescence. She’s been a busybody in any way she can be, since she’s not allowed to lift her heavy pots and pans—cast iron, a lot of them—and she’s had to back off from any of her normal activities.

“Can’t just sit.” That was her answer when I asked why she was organizing hand towels in the linen closet. Poor thing is going stir-crazy.

I start opening drawers, because it has to be here somewhere. First drawer, invoices. Second drawer, nothing but staff schedules and a stapler. Third drawer sticks. I jerk the thing, and it gives all at once.

Shipping manifests. Dozens of them, banded in stacks, dense with routing codes and container numbers and port stamps. Lab documents underneath—not Sarah’s, I know that at a glance, because I know Sarah’s labs cold.

These are formulary sheets. Chemical assays. Tables of active-ingredient percentages against stated dosages. And the percentages are wrong. Grotesquely wrong. A column of drugs listed at full strength on the label and single digits in the assay.

What the absolute fuck am I looking at?

I stand very still and make my brain read what’s on the page instead of what I want to be on the page. Because my brain is very good at truth, and I don’t want it to be. Not right now.

Counterfeit pharmaceuticals. Allegra’s voice creeps into my head, laughing about “the other cargo.”

On the third manifest down, a drug name I could pick out blind at fifty paces, because I’ve watched a six-year-old swallow it every Thursday for months. Methotrexate. The word I’ve said a thousand times in a thousand rooms to frightened parents.

I couched it as the long but gentle road out of the disease. “It’s an old drug, very effective, with a low rate of side effects. Some patients don’t even feel it when they take it. Others might feel a bit woozy or need to nap more on their dosage day, but most patients end up building a tolerance to it, so their dosage day is just like any other…”

The thing I counseled them on is why a counterfeit version can easily go unnoticed. If they don’t normally experience the haze that can come with it, or if they think they’ve built that tolerance, they would never notice that they’re taking a fake, almost zero-dose version of the medication.

Here it is on a manifest moving toward some other frightened parent who will thank God for it and watch their child get sicker anyway.

The floor doesn’t literally drop. My knees just stop being reliable. I put a hand on the desk and read it again, all of it over and over and over, the way I’d read a chart I desperately needed to be wrong. It doesn’t get better on the seventh pass or the twelfth.

Fake chemotherapy. Shipped in Lupo’s boxes. In the house where I’ve been sleeping next to him.

Every warm thing I have felt turns to icy stone. The coffee I learned to make him. The scar I kiss when we’re naked. “I’m not pretending anymore.” His non-answer I mistook for being overwhelmed by his emotions.

Before she finds out.

It’s almost funny. After the midnight conversation, I had thought of a million things that he might be hiding from me. I even thought it might have been Allegra planning some gruesome interception of me, since he was talking about the Brancatis and me.

I never would have imagined it was this… this horror.