Digoxin. It’s a real cardiac drug, that’s the beautiful part. In the right hands it helps a failing heart keep time. In mine, given the right way over enough months, it does exactly the opposite.

And no one looks twice, because a fifty-six-year-old man with a bad heart who dies of a bad heart is just a sad, ordinary story.” She sat back. “You never questioned a single pill.

You trusted me completely. That was always going to be the easiest part.”

The monitor beside the bed climbed, the intervals between beats shortening. She glanced at it and laid a manicured hand flat on his chest, over the racing of his heart, the way a wife might to soothe a frightened husband.

“Shh,” she murmured, and smiled at the cruelty of it. “Don’t go before I’ve said goodbye. That would be rude.”

Roderick lay pinned under her hand and her voice, unable to shout, unable to rise, unable to do anything but understand. And what he understood, more than the fear, more than the fury, was the loss of four years.