Chapter 17: The Hand in the Kitchen

"Put it down, Renata," I said.

She didn't jump.

She set the tin on the counter very gently, beside a small scale and a mortar, and turned around.

Her hair was in a net and her face was bare, and she looked every one of her thirty-nine years.

"I wondered which of you would come first," she said.

"The box came today."

"Yesterday. It came yesterday, on the first Monday, like always."

"You've been grinding it."

"Into the tea. Into the rims of the cups." She looked at her hands. "It's an old trick. You rub the paste into the glaze and it dries clear."

I had known. I had still hoped.

"The rim of mine had three times as much," I said.

"A man called me."

"Conway."

"A man from his office. He said you'd started reading labels." Her voice was perfectly level. "He said you were the one person who could ruin us."

"Us."

"I liked you," Renata said. "You were kind to me the first morning. Nobody in this house has asked how I slept in twenty years."

"And you dosed my cup."

"I stood over that tray for ten minutes with both cups in my hands. Then I did it."

Her face crumpled, and she covered it with her sleeve.

I let the silence stand.

I'm a doctor, and I have told women their husbands were dead, and I have never once enjoyed being the one who knows.

"Tell me why," I said.

"Aldo said Lucian was dying anyway. He brought the importer in the winter. He said it was a tonic for pain, that it would let him sleep."

"When did you know it wasn't?"

"March. Lucian's doctor called me crying, a week before the car." She took a breath. "I didn't stop."

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