His Love Was My Poison novel · Chapter 8 of 48

Chapter 8: Every Centimeter

Micah read the card over my shoulder.

He didn't make a joke.

He just put the lid of the box down very gently on the quilt.

"She wanted it by your bed," he said.

"Yes."

"Not his. Yours."

"Yes."

I read the next card, and the next.

Most of them said the same thing.

For your mother's light. E.

A few were more personal.

Is she still poorly? Make sure she burns it every night. It helps with sleep.

I put them in an envelope from my bag, and I put the braid in another, and I sealed both and wrote the date and time and my initials across the seals.

I took photos of the room, the closet, the box.

Then I put the house back exactly the way we'd found it, locked the door and reset the alarm.

We drove to Pittsburgh without stopping, except for gas and terrible gas station hot dogs that Micah swore were a regional delicacy.

My old professor still ran a lab at the university.

He was seventy and had eyebrows, and he'd once failed me on a quiz for writing too neatly.

He listened to the whole story in his office with his fingers steepled.

"Segmental analysis," he said when I finished. "Centimeter by centimeter. It'll take three days."

"I need it in two."

"You've always been unreasonable. It's why I liked you."

He did it in two.

He spread the results across his desk on Friday afternoon, a long chart with a line running across it.

My braid was fifty centimeters long.

More than four years of my life, written down in keratin.

Arsenic in every single centimeter.

Lead in every single centimeter.

And the line rose steadily toward the cut end, toward the last weeks before I left.

"You were getting more of it, not less," my professor said. "Whoever was doing this was turning it up."

I stared at that rising line.

The month I finally walked out, I'd been sicker than ever.

If I had stayed another year, I might not have lived to see it.

"These samples are older than your career," he said. "No one could look at this and think you put that arsenic there. You were a housewife in Alaska."

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