…I heard the bathroom door open. I didn’t think. I closed the laptop, tucked it under my arm, picked up the blue mug with my other hand, and walked out the front door in my socks. I didn’t run. Running makes noise. I walked to my neighbor’s house and knocked until she opened.
“Call 911,” I said. “And lock the door.” She didn’t ask questions. She saw my face and did it. I sat on her kitchen floor holding the mug in both hands while she talked to the dispatcher. Through her front window, I watched Mark come out onto our porch in a towel, looking up and down the street, then go back inside.
The police took everything. The laptop. The mug. A sample of the tea from the tin in our cupboard. The lab found something in the tea that should never be in tea. Small amounts. Every day. For about a week. The doctor at the hospital said it explained the stomach pains, the headaches, the dizziness I’d been blaming on stress. He said another week might have been too late.
On the laptop, the detectives found nine “Practice” videos. In the last one, Mark cried on cue. They also found a life insurance policy he’d taken out on me in the spring. I had signed it. I thought it was a mortgage form.
Mark was arrested that afternoon. When the detective told me, I asked one question. “Why the videos?” She said, “He wanted to make sure he sounded sad enough for the cameras.”
I gave a statement. I testified. He’s serving a long sentence now. I moved to a new apartment and didn’t buy a single mug for a year. My sister bought me one last Christmas. It’s yellow. On the bottom, she wrote in marker: “Made by someone who loves you. Drink up.” It’s the first thing I drink out of every morning now. I make the tea myself.
