Fine.
Hungry.
Need coffee.
Instead I told the truth.
“Like I aged ten years in five days,” I said. “Like I want to sleep for a month. Like I am simultaneously the saddest I have ever been and the surest I have ever been about anything in my life.”
Kurt nodded once.
“And Cassandra?”
I looked back toward her room. Through the narrow window in the door I could see the foot of the bed, the monitors, the soft rectangle of afternoon light on the wall.
“Cassandra is going to be fine,” I said. “She was always going to be fine. She’s the toughest person I know.”
Then I added, because if you don’t make a joke at the right time the grief starts thinking it owns the whole house, “And she married me, which proves she can survive anything.”
Kurt laughed. A real laugh. It bounced off the corridor walls and loosened something in my chest for half a second.
The arrest was not the end.
People love to imagine that the cuffs are the finish line because it makes justice look cinematic. It isn’t. Arrest is logistics. The real work comes after, when lawyers start testing the load-bearing beams of your certainty and the story has to survive being told in rooms built for doubt.
The district attorney’s office moved faster than I expected once Margaret delivered everything and the hospital toxicology team backed it up. Charges were filed. Investigators interviewed staff, neighbors, pharmacists, and the estate attorney. Subpoenas went out. Bank records multiplied. The supplement purchases formed their own neat little path through surveillance timestamps and receipts. Preston’s call to the attorney’s office, in which he impersonated Cassandra’s assistant badly enough that the receptionist had made a note about “unusual tone,” became the sort of detail juries remember because arrogance is memorable.
Cassandra continued to recover.
Slowly at first.
Then all at once in ways that made the first slowness easier to forgive.
Her color returned. Her appetite came back in crooked little increments. Her voice stopped sounding like dry leaves. By the second week she was insulting the hospital oatmeal with almost professional sharpness.
“This tastes like a sermon about grain,” she told me one morning.
I had been halfway to tears over a lab report five minutes earlier. That sentence saved me.
When she was strong enough to sit up for longer stretches, Margaret came to the hospital and explained the process.
The state would prosecute the criminal case. Margaret would protect our finances, coordinate with prosecutors, oversee the civil exposure, and make sure nobody on our side said anything stupid because grief makes fools out of otherwise educated people.
Cassandra listened with her hands folded over the blanket.
When Margaret finished, Cassandra said, “Are they going to try to make this look like a misunderstanding about supplements?”
“Probably,” Margaret said. “Defense attorneys are paid to rent ambiguity where they can.”
Cassandra’s mouth went flat.
“Well,” she said, “I hope they enjoy bankruptcy. Because if anyone uses the word misunderstanding about this, I am suing whatever still belongs to them.”
Margaret smiled like a woman admiring quality craftsmanship.
“You and I are going to get along beautifully.”
Three months later Cassandra came home.
October in our town does this particular thing with light in the mornings. It turns everything gold for about forty-five minutes and makes even ugly houses look like they have emotional depth. I pulled into the driveway with Cassandra beside me, thinner than she had been, still tired faster than she liked to admit, but upright, alive, and glaring at the world with restored standards.