Chapter 3

I ordered the camera from my phone in the driveway of a grocery store, paid with a card in my maiden name, and had it delivered to a locker two towns over. It looked like a phone charger. It plugged into the outlet beside the kitchen counter, eleven inches from where Adam made my tea, and streamed to a cloud account he'd need a subpoena and my thumbprint to find. I installed it Thursday morning while he was at the gym. Then I did the hardest thing I have ever done, which was live in that house for four more days. I ate his food. I laughed at his jokes. I let him rub my burning feet in front of a documentary about glaciers, and when he said, "We'll figure this out, Nor, I'm not going anywhere," I said, "I know." At night I lay next to him and listened to him sleep — deep, even, untroubled, the breathing of a man with a clean conscience — and I ran through my own bloodwork in my head like a rosary. Because here is the thing nobody tells you about being poisoned: you can't just stop. If I stopped drinking the tea, he'd know. If he knew, he'd escalate — and thallium is the patient man's poison, but there are impatient ones. Insulin. Potassium chloride. A fall down the stairs of the house where the sick wife lived. A "hospice consult" and a morphine pump managed by a nurse who was sleeping with my husband. So I did what I could. I ordered Prussian blue — the actual antidote, ferric hexacyanoferrate, the ugly little capsules that bind thallium in your gut and carry it out — through a colleague at a poison control center who owed me a favor and asked no questions. I took them at 5 a.m., in the shower, with the water running. And I watched the footage. Friday night, 9:31 p.m. The camera caught the counter in perfect grayscale. Adam fills the kettle. Adam hums. Adam takes down my blue mug. Then Adam reaches to the back of the spice shelf and takes out the little tin of stevia I've never once used, and taps it — tap, tap — into the mug. Not a heap. A dusting. He's careful. He's practiced. He stirs for exactly twelve seconds. Then he tastes the spoon. He tastes it, and nothing happens to his face, because thallium has no taste at all, and my husband already knew that. He wipes the spoon on a paper towel. He folds the paper towel into quarters. He puts it in his pocket. Then he picks up the mug and calls, "Nor? Come sit with me." And on the video you can hear my own voice from the other room, warm and tired and utterly stupid, saying, "Coming, babe." I watched it eleven times. On the twelfth, I stopped seeing my husband and started seeing an exhibit number. Saturday, I made two calls. The first was to Vivian Roth, the meanest asset attorney in King County, who once got a woman her ex-husband's boat, his beach house, and his dog. "Freeze nothing yet," I told her. "If accounts freeze, he knows. But I want everything documented, and I want a copy of every dollar that's moved since March." The second was to my brother Elliot, who is a deputy prosecutor and who answered the phone with "It's Saturday, Nora," and then went completely silent for nine seconds after I said the word thallium. "Say it again," he said. "Adam is poisoning me. I have the mug, the hair, the timeline, the insurance rider, the phone, and video." "Where are you right now?" "In my kitchen." "Nora—" "I'm not running, Elliot. If I run, he goes to ground and the cremation deposit becomes a story about a paranoid sick woman who left her devoted husband." I looked out at the water, gray and flat as a slab. "I'm going to hand a detective a case so clean she can wrap it in a bow." "Give me until Monday. There's a state investigator I trust." That night, Adam made the tea. He set it down in front of me and, for the first time in five months, he didn't walk away. He pulled out the chair across from mine, folded his hands, and watched me. Smiling. Patient. Waiting. "Doctor's orders, love," my husband said. "All of it." I picked up the mug.