“Dorothy, the toxicology results came back. They found arsenic. It wasn’t accidental.”
Neither of us spoke for several seconds. Then Laura looked directly at me and said aloud what I had already begun to suspect.
“Those chocolates weren’t meant for us, were they? They were meant for you.”
I couldn’t deny it anymore. The chocolates had arrived specifically for my birthday, and Thomas’s reaction after discovering I had given them away made horrifying sense now that we knew they contained poison.
Thomas, meanwhile, had disappeared. He hadn’t come to the hospital to see his children, and his accounting firm said he had taken emergency leave because of a supposed family crisis, leaving Laura alone to deal with the consequences.
I suspected I knew where he had gone. Whenever Thomas faced consequences he couldn’t control, he turned to my younger sister Natalie, who had spent years defending him and excusing behavior I should have confronted much earlier.
I drove directly to Natalie’s house. She opened the door looking uncomfortable and immediately admitted Thomas was sitting in her kitchen, so I walked past her without wasting time on explanations.
Thomas sat at the table with his head lowered. When he finally looked at me, I searched his face for shame, grief, or even fear for his children, but instead I saw resentment.
