Then I saw her. Face down on the hardwood. Her skin was the color of old parchment, pale and translucent. Her breathing was a wet, ragged sound, shallow and weak, like someone drowning in the open air.
“Emily!”
I dropped my laptop bag—the thud echoing too loudly—and slid to my knees beside her. She tried to speak, her mouth opening and closing, but only broken, choking sounds escaped. Her eyes were open but unmoored, the pupils dilated to black saucers. Her lips were cracked and dry. Her hands, usually so steady, were trembling with a violent, rhythmic palsy.
My sister-in-law, Karen, was standing by the kitchen door. She held her phone in a white-knuckled grip, staring at me.
“When I got here, she was already like this,” Karen said. The words came out too fast, too polished. A stream of data without the necessary latency of shock. “I don’t know what happened. I just arrived maybe five minutes ago and found her on the floor. I was about to call 911.”
Something in her voice scraped against my nerves. It sounded rehearsed. Mechanical.
“What do you mean you just got here?” My hands shook as I pressed two fingers to Emily’s neck. Her pulse was a terrifying, thready flutter. “I thought you came by for lunch like we planned.”
“But when I walked in, she was like this,” Karen repeated, dodging the question.
“Lunch was six hours ago, Karen!” I snapped, the panic rising in my throat like bile.
She blinked, a momentary glitch in her composure. “I meant… I came by after lunch. Around five. To check on her.”
I cradled Emily’s head. “Honey, look at me. What happened?”
She tried to focus. Her eyes locked onto mine, and in them, I saw a raw, primal terror that I had never seen in six years of marriage. It wasn’t confusion. It was fear. She darted a glance at Karen, then back to me, her chest heaving.
I grabbed my phone and dialed 911. Behind me, Karen began to pace. She started talking—a nervous, incessant drone about the traffic on I-5, the rain, a sale at Nordstrom. She was filling the air with static, anything to drown out the reality of her sister dying on the floor.
“Sir, what is your emergency?”
“My wife. She’s collapsed. Can’t speak. Signs of shock.”
As I gave the dispatcher the details, I watched Karen. She wasn’t looking at Emily. She was looking at the hallway, at the kitchen counter, everywhere but at the person she claimed to love. And for the first time, a cold, dark algorithm of suspicion began to run in the back of my mind.
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