“I found these in Mrs.

Dulce’s locked vanity, sir,” she whispered.

“I was cleaning the master bath while she was out.

I knocked a tray and it jammed the drawer, and when I worked it free, a false bottom slipped out.

There were these — and a second set of financial papers.” I did not need her to explain what the vials were.

I will not set down here what she told me they were for, or how she said they worked; it is enough that I understood, in the space of a breath, that my wife had been keeping in a hidden compartment the means to end my life in a way that would look, to any doctor, like nothing more than an old heart giving out.