Twelve Months To Ruin You

First Attempt

Anne did it at seven fifteen on a Wednesday morning.

Derrick was in the shower. She could hear the water running from down the hall. She had eleven minutes, maybe twelve if he took his time, which he usually didn’t.

She moved quickly. Not frantically, she wasn’t frantic, she’d planned this too carefully for frantic, but with the focused efficiency of someone who had rehearsed every step. The substance was odourless. Colourless. She’d researched it for two weeks, cross-referencing three separate sources until she was certain about the dosage, certain about the timeline, certain about what it would look like when it happened.

Natural causes. That was what it would look like. She needed it to look like natural causes.

She did what she came to do. Rinsed her hands. Put everything back exactly where it was. Checked the counter once, twice, and then walked to the kitchen table, sat down and opened her laptop like she’d been there the whole time.

The shower stopped.

Her hands were completely steady.

She thought about her father. About Clement Wheeler sitting at a table not unlike this one in the last months of his life, bills stacked everywhere, a company crumbling under him, a man broken by people he’d trusted. She thought about what she’d been told. About the Cavell name and what it had cost her family. She thought about her mother’s voice going quiet every time someone mentioned Clement, the way Celestine still couldn’t look at photographs from before.

By the time Derrick walked into the kitchen, Anne was reading an email.

“Morning,” he said.

“Morning.”

He made coffee. She kept reading. He sat at the island with his phone and they existed in the same room the way they did every morning now, easy, unbothered, two people who had learned each other’s rhythms without discussing it.

He picked up the cup she hadn’t touched and she watched him in her peripheral vision and felt nothing.

Or almost nothing.

She turned back to her laptop.

****

She got through a full day at the firm. Client meetings, two reports, a call that ran forty minutes longer than it should have. Maya brought lunch at one and she ate it at her desk. She did not think about what she’d done that morning. She had decided not to think about it and she was good at deciding things.

By four she was reviewing a contract for a new client and her phone hadn’t rung and there was no message from the building, no missed calls from numbers she didn’t recognise, nothing.

She told herself no news was normal. These things took time. She’d been careful about the dosage precisely because she needed it to look natural and natural things didn’t happen in hours.

She went back to the contract.

****

Dinner. She made pasta, her default, her comfort, the thing she cooked when she needed her hands to be doing something ordinary.

Derrick came home at six fifty and said the board had been difficult and she said they usually were and he washed his hands, sat down and that was it. Normal. Easy.

She put the plate in front of him, sat across from him, he ate and talked about a contract negotiation that had gone sideways and she listened and asked questions and somewhere in the middle of it he said — “How did the Abara account resolve? You mentioned them Monday.”

Anne looked up. “You remembered that.”

“You said the timeline was tight.”

“It was. It resolved.” She picked up her fork. “They accepted the revised terms.”

“Good.” He reached for his water. “I know you were worried about it.”

She hadn’t said she was worried. She’d mentioned it once, in passing, Monday morning, on her way out of the kitchen with her bag already on her shoulder.

She looked at her food.

She wasn’t going to do anything with the fact that he remembered. She was simply noting it and moving on.

After dinner she washed up and he dried and she handed him things without looking and he put them away and when they were done he said goodnight and went to his room and she stood at the sink and the kitchen was clean and quiet and she was fine.

****

She lay awake at eleven going over it.

Not guilty. She wasn’t guilty. She had reasons. Real, legitimate, deeply personal reasons that she’d been carrying for six years and that didn’t evaporate because Derrick Cavell remembered a client name and dried dishes without being asked.

She went over the morning instead. Every step. The timing had been right. The dosage had been right. She’d been meticulous.

So why hadn’t anything happened?

She stared at the ceiling. Maybe the timeline was longer than she’d calculated. Maybe the body processed it slower depending on variables she hadn’t accounted for. Maybe she needed to wait another day, two days, before she’d know.

She closed her eyes.

Her last thought before sleep was not about the attempt.

It was about Derrick at the table saying *I know you were worried about it* in the same tone he used for everything…..flat, direct, no decoration, and the fact that she hadn’t told him she was worried but he’d known anyway.

She pushed it away and went to sleep.