That is not paranoia. That is arithmetic, and I did it in about two seconds, and the fact that I could do it that fast should have told me something about what I had already half known.
A woman does not run that calculation in two seconds unless she has been rehearsing some version of it for a while without admitting she was.
A woman who has been forgetting things since the autumn says her husband put something in her soup, in front of eleven relatives, with no evidence.I know exactly how that story ends, because I have since found out that it was the story he was already telling.
So I waited.
Four minutes. I have timed it since, on a Sunday, alone in my own kitchen, with a clock, which is a thing I did in about the July and which I am not going to explain.
Four minutes is a very long time to sit at a table with your family.
Dinner carried on around me. His mother talked about the holidays. Somebody told a story everybody had heard. There was an argument about a parking space.
Except he kept looking at me. Then at my soup. Then back at me.
He was waiting for something.
That is when the last of my doubt went. A man does not watch a bowl.
And I have since understood the timing, which is the part that makes my skin move.
He was not waiting to see if I would eat it.
He was waiting to see how long it took. He had done it eleven times and he knew roughly what the interval was, and he was checking it against a clock, in a room with his family in it, on a Sunday.PART 3
A few minutes later an argument started at the other end of the table and nobody was watching anything.
I moved very quietly.
One bowl shifted. Then another. Nobody looked up.
It took about four seconds and I did not look at anybody while I did it.
My hands were completely steady, which has bothered me since more than almost anything else in this account.
And I want to record the other thing, which nobody has asked me and which I have not volunteered until now.
I did not choose that bowl.
I have been letting people assume that I selected hers, deliberately, because she was the other one in it.
