A few more months, a few more mornings, and my body would have crossed the line from damaged to failing, and I would have died with a plausible diagnosis and a grieving mother-in-law at my bedside, and no one would ever have known.

Esme would have grown up believing her mother died of a mystery illness, raised by the woman who caused it.

The whole thing would have worked.

It had been working, for years, and the only reason it hadn’t finished was that an eight-year-old had noticed something white going into a cup and decided her mother should know.

I lay in the dark and understood how thin the margin had been between the life I was going to get to keep and the death that had been so carefully prepared for me, and I made myself a promise in the silence: that I would not waste it, and that I would not let her win, and that whatever it cost, my daughter would grow up with her mother alive.

Chapter 5 — Before Dawn