I sat my husband down and showed him: the camera footage, the toxicology, the pharmacy receipt with a stranger’s name.

He watched his own mother, on the small bright screen, prepare to poison his wife with the ease of long practice, and he folded forward over the kitchen table with his head in his hands.

“This can’t be real.

My mother could not — she could not do this.”

“I believed that for ten years too,” I said, and pulled him up by the front of his jacket.

“And right now we put it down, all of it, and we go get our daughter.”