His Love Was My Poison novel · Chapter 3 of 48

Chapter 3: His Mother's Light

Eleanor works the room with sweet cruelty, Lenora answers her in front of the officers' wives, and a parting line about candles tells Lenora exactly where the poison came from.

Royce lifted his hand and waved back at the boy.

He did it without thinking.

Then he remembered me and let his hand fall.

"That's Kit," Micah said quietly. "Isn't it?"

"That's the baby in the photo."

Eleanor Varley walked out into the light in a silver sequined jacket and cowboy boots.

She was forty-four and looked thirty.

Her blond hair fell in big soft waves, and a little silver music note hung at her throat.

She laughed into the microphone.

"Fort Irwin! Did y'all miss me?"

They roared that they had.

She sang for forty minutes.

I'll give her this: she could sing.

Her last song was slow.

"This one's for a man who's been through hell and came back better," she said. "He knows who he is."

She looked straight at Royce when she said it.

Every head in the tent turned to look at him, and then, one by one, at me.

I ate my cake.

"It's good cake," Micah told the nearest colonel. "She's not ignoring you. She's just very focused on frosting."

When the set ended, Eleanor came down off the stage and worked the tables.

She signed hats and kissed cheeks and let privates take pictures.

She took her time getting to us.

When she finally arrived, she brought the boy and a crowd of officers' wives with her.

"Royce, honey," she said, and touched his arm.

Then she turned to me with a big warm smile.

"And you must be the girl he kept up in Alaska. Lenora, right? I've heard so much."

"I'm sure you have."

"He used to worry about you something awful. You were always so poorly."

She tilted her head.

"Do you still get those headaches?"

I went very still.

I had never met this woman in my life.

I had never told anyone but Royce about the headaches.

"Not anymore," I said. "They stopped the week I left."

One of the wives laughed before she could stop herself.

Eleanor's smile didn't move, but her eyes did.

"Well, good for you," she said. "Some women just aren't built for Army life. It takes a certain kind of girl."

"It does," I said. "The kind who stays home and keeps the candle lit."

Micah coughed into his napkin.

The boy was looking at the case at my feet.

I had brought one of our kits to show the evaluators, and it sat in its padded box with the lid open.

"Is that a spectrometer?" he asked.

Everyone looked down at him.

"Close," I said. "It's a sensor. It finds metal in water."

"Like gold?"

"Like arsenic. And lead."

"Arsenic is a poison," he said, very serious. "It was in green wallpaper in Victorian times. People got sick from their walls."

"That's exactly right."

He brightened.

"I'm Kit. I'm ten. Can I hold it?"

I looked at Royce.

Royce looked at the ground.

"Kit, don't bother the lady," Eleanor said.

"He's not bothering me."

I lifted the kit out and set it carefully in his hands.

It was heavy, and he held it like a baby bird.

"The light turns green if the water's clean," I told him. "Red if it isn't."

"What if it's red?"

"Then you don't drink it, and you find out where it came from."

He nodded slowly.

Eleanor took the kit out of his hands and gave it back to me.

"We have to go, sweetheart. Say goodnight to Daddy."

Kit hugged Royce around the middle.

Royce put his hand on the boy's dark hair and closed his eyes for one second.

The officers' wives watched every bit of it.

So did I.

Then Eleanor kissed Royce on the cheek, slow, right in front of me.

"I left your box on your porch," she said. "Your new candles. I know you can't sleep without your mother's light."

She walked away with her son, waving at the soldiers.

I sat there and didn't hear a word anyone said for a full minute.

Your mother's light.

The candles had come in a box every month for five years.

Hand-poured, white, with a little stamp on the bottom.

Royce had told me they came from an old friend of his mother's.

I'd lit one beside the bed every night he was away.

I'd breathed it while I slept.

He'd been gone most nights in Alaska.

Now he was alone every night, and he lit it himself.

I'd been sick then.

He was sick now.

There was only one thing that had been in both our rooms.

And the woman who'd just asked about my headaches had made it with her own hands.

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