And what I thought was: you have got this wrong.
That was the first complete sentence in my head. Not he is poisoning me.
You have got this wrong, Merritt, you are tired, you have been getting things wrong since the summer.
Six months of work, right there, doing exactly what it was built to do, eleven feet from the kitchen.PART 2
And six months came back at me all at once, standing in that hallway.
The dizziness. The exhaustion. The strange trouble concentrating.
Walking into a room and completely forgetting why, which happened four times in one week in the February and which I mentioned to nobody.
I had blamed stress. Work. Getting older, which is the explanation everybody hands a woman of fifty-four and which she generally accepts.
My doctor had run tests in the January and found nothing obvious, and I had been quietly relieved, and Renwick had driven me there and back both times.
He came in with me. Both appointments.
I thought that was kindness and I told two friends it was kindness.
He answered a question for me in the second one. The doctor asked how long the episodes had been going on and I started to say something and he said since about June, love, and I stopped talking, and she wrote it down.
June. He gave her the date. In a consulting room, out loud, to a professional, eleven months before I ever saw a letter dated the May.
Until that moment it had never once occurred to me that the answer might be inside my own house.Seconds later he came into the dining room carrying that bowl and put it down in front of me.
He said, pleasantly: there you go. Extra pepper, just how you like it.
I looked at the soup. Then at him.
His smile was normal. His body was not. Under the table his knee was going continuously, which it does when he is late for something, and which he has done since he was a young man.
I thought about confronting him right there.
And I stopped myself, and it took about two seconds, and the reasoning was completely clear.
Because all I had seen was a packet. I did not know what had been in it.
If I accused him at that table he would simply deny it, his mother would defend him — and after six months of dizziness and confusion, they could very easily suggest I had misunderstood what I saw.
