At first, I laughed.
“I’m not a child, Daniel. If I’m not hungry, I’m not going to eat.”
But he never smiled.
He would sit across from me and wait until I swallowed the final spoonful. Sometimes he would even take the bowl and
check to make sure there was nothing left at the bottom.
The most frightening thing was the way he watched me. It felt as if he wasn’t waiting for me to finish dinner. He was making
sure that something entered my body.
One evening, I pretended to pour the soup down the sink. Daniel noticed there was still some left in the pot and
immediately filled another bowl.
“Please, don’t argue with me tonight,” he said. “Just trust me.”
“Then tell me what’s in it.”
He remained silent for a moment.
“What your body needs.”
After that answer, I could no longer sleep peacefully.
Daniel’s behavior had changed in other ways as well. He made secret phone calls, frequently went into the garage, and
locked the door behind him. I found a receipt from a medical center in his jacket pocket, and his internet search history was
always deleted.
One night, I woke up and saw him standing beside our bed. He was watching to see whether I was breathing.
“What are you doing?” I asked, frightened.
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
By the following morning, I had made my decision.
That evening, when Daniel left the kitchen for a few minutes, I poured some of the soup into a small glass jar and hid it in my
purse. The next day, I took it to a private laboratory. I told an employee that I suspected a foreign substance had been added
to my food. She studied my face for several seconds.
“Do you believe someone may be poisoning you?”
I couldn’t bring myself to answer aloud. I simply nodded. They promised to send me the results in three days.
Those were the longest three days of my life. Every evening at exactly 7:14, Daniel closed the curtains again, brought me the
soup, and sat beside me. I ate while imagining the worst.
Perhaps he was trying to make me sick. Maybe the soup was the reason I had been constantly tired over the past few weeks.
Perhaps the medical center receipt wasn’t connected to me at all, and he was planning with someone else to get rid of me.
On the third day, the laboratory called.
“Mrs. Carter?”
“Yes.”
“We need to discuss the sample you brought us in person. Can you come in today?”
My hands immediately turned cold. At the laboratory, a doctor asked me to sit down and placed several sheets of paper on
the desk.
