I found my own obituary in my husband's laptop bag. Printed. Proofread. Folded in thirds. Dated three weeks from today. I have been dying for five months. Six specialists. No answers. I am a forensic toxicologist. And standing in my own kitchen at 9:40 on a Tuesday night, I finally understood what was killing me. My hands didn't shake. That should have surprised me. It didn't. My hands haven't shaken in twenty years of pipetting nanogram samples, and they weren't going to start now. Dr. Nora Ashcroft, 39, of Bainbridge Island, passed peacefully at home surrounded by family after a courageous battle with an undiagnosed autoimmune illness. She is survived by her devoted husband, Adam. Devoted husband. Underneath the obituary was a receipt. Cedarhill Funeral Home. A $4,000 deposit, paid nineteen days ago. Cremation package. Expedited. Cremation. I'm the person the state police call when a body comes in and nobody can explain why. I know exactly what cremation does to a corpse. It destroys tissue. It destroys stomach contents. It destroys everything a medical examiner would need to prove that someone was murdered. It does not destroy hair. Upstairs, the shower shut off. I put the obituary back into the laptop bag, exactly the way I found it, aligned the zipper pull to the left the way Adam always leaves it, and set the bag against the leg of the console table. Then I did what I do at work. I catalogued. Five months of symptoms. Nausea that came in waves and always after dinner. Numbness in my feet that turned into a burning I could feel through the soles of my shoes. Hair on my pillow, then hair in the drain, then hair in my hands in fistfuls until I cut it to my chin and pretended I wanted a change. Six specialists. Lupus, they guessed. Then fibromyalgia. Then "stress," which is what doctors say to a woman when they've run out of ideas. Nobody ran a heavy metals panel. Why would they? I wasn't a factory worker. I was a woman with a good marriage and a beautiful house and a husband who came to every appointment holding my coat. "You're up." Adam came down the stairs barefoot, hair damp, in the gray T-shirt I bought him in Lisbon. Forty-two years old and still built like the college swimmer he'd been. "I thought you were down for the night." "I got thirsty." "Sit. I've got you." He crossed to the counter and reached for the blue mug. My mug. The electrolyte tea he'd been making me every single night since March, since the week my patent royalties came through and the license check cleared for more money than either of us had ever seen at once. "Doctor said hydration." "Which doctor?" "All of them." He laughed, and it was warm, and that's the part I keep coming back to. It was warm. He stirred, tapped the spoon twice on the rim, wiped it with a paper towel and put the paper towel in his pocket instead of the trash. I watched him do it. He'd done it four hundred times and I had never once seen it. "Here." He set the mug in front of me and kissed the top of my head, which is where you kiss someone who is already halfway gone. "Drink it while it's hot, Nor." I wrapped both hands around the mug. And that's when I saw my nails. White bands. Horizontal, clean-edged, marching across all ten nail beds like tide lines. Mees' lines. I have testified about Mees' lines in three homicide trials. I have stood in front of a jury with a photograph exactly like the hands in my lap and explained, slowly, in words a jury can follow, that these bands do not appear in lupus, or fibromyalgia, or stress. They appear in heavy metal poisoning. "Nora?" Adam tilted his head. "You okay?" "Long day." I lifted the mug and let the steam touch my lips without drinking. "I'll take it upstairs." "Finish it," he said. "I will." I climbed the stairs slowly, because that's all I could do anymore, and locked the bathroom door. I poured the tea into an empty contact lens case, sealed it, labeled it with the date in ballpoint on masking tape. Then I looked at the woman in the mirror. Thirty-nine. Twenty-two pounds down. Hair like a chemo patient's. I wasn't dying. I was being killed. And he had already picked the flowers.