It is that the number had a shape my training let me read at a glance, and reading it was one of the worst moments of my life.

This was the cruelty of choosing a physician’s household as your hunting ground: everything about the plan was designed to pass as ordinary medicine, to look, afterward, like the sad but unremarkable sudden death of a stressed woman in her thirties.

A grieving husband.

A tidy certificate.

No autopsy anyone thought to demand.

It had worked twice.

I sat in that fluorescent room at one in the morning and understood that I was alive, and Alyssa and Ines were not, for one reason only, and the reason was asleep against my shoulder in a plastic chair.

Deputies searching the ranch house found the small brown vial tucked behind the pantry.