Then Detective Fam showed me Freya’s text messages.
Each one in isolation looked like a mother checking in on her son. But in sequence, in context, they were something else entirely.
She brought up the tea thing again at dinner. Heads up.
She scheduled something with a doctor for Tuesday.
The party’s Saturday. She better not pull anything.
Freya was not simply a difficult mother-in-law. She was surveillance. She was monitoring my mounting suspicions and relaying them to Leo in real time, managing the timeline. She knew about the tea. She knew what was in it. She had stood over me on that driveway and accused me of faking while she knew, with complete precision, exactly why I could not move.
That was the one that broke me. Not Leo. Leo I could almost file under greed and cowardice and the particular moral failure of a person who decides that their inconvenience outweighs another human being’s life. But Freya was sixty-three years old. She was a mother. She had watched me deteriorate across five months with the monitoring attention of a project manager, and her only concern was that I might reach a doctor before the work was finished.
