And I had pushed them both away, angry, certain, a foolish old man flattered that a beautiful young woman could love him.

The grief of that — not the poison, but the picture of my own children’s faces as I chose a stranger over them — was the thing that nearly broke me at my desk.

And then, slowly, it hardened into something colder and far more useful: the flat, patient focus I had not felt since the years I spent taking apart other men’s companies for a living.

I had forgotten that man.

That was perhaps the most dangerous thing Dulce had done to me — not the substance in the tea, but the slow erosion of my sense of my own competence, until I half believed the frail, fumbling old fellow she described to her guests was who I actually was.

But he was not who I was.