Mortimer Randolph’s demise was the icing on the cake. I’m not a killer, in case you’re wondering. I was reconciling, that’s all. It had been child’s play convincing the old fool that I was on the staff of his cleaning service; he didn’t question my arrival at irregular times, separate from his regular cleaning lady, the better to spy on Marin and see how my baby girl was getting on. I almost blew it when she nearly saw my face in the hallway. I was afraid she’d recognize me, but I’d changed a lot in fifteen years, and thanks to a cheap wig and glasses, she didn’t see through my gray-headed charwoman disguise. When I overheard how the bastard talked to her, I was livid—but at least she stood up him. Good for her! But no one treated my daughter like trash and got away with it. Not even me. So I spiked his coffee with an extra dose of all the meds he was already taking…and then some. It was merely serendipitous that he happened to die from a heart attack and left his inheritance to Marin. She deserved every penny of it. And it was my fault she never got to enjoy it.

In a way, I was that knife in the first act, the harmless prop that turns out to be the linchpin of the whole damn play. I was there when it all began, and I was there in the end when it all was split wide open and gutted. After watching Marin die, I followed the news for the next six months, reading details of how Marin’s husband Cody—I would never understand what she saw in him—arrived back at their house to a kitchen full of paramedics and cops who had responded to my 9-1-1 call. I had been too shocked to speak, too panicked to stick around as the operator spoke to the empty air, eventually tracking the address and dispatching help. I couldn’t explain why I ran instead of waiting around for the EMTs to announce what I already knew—her time of death. Maybe it was fear of the police connecting me to Mortimer’s untimely—well past due, if you ask me—passing, or paranoia that they’d call it murder instead of an accident. I was a drug user, after all, with a rap sheet, forever stereotyped as all class of criminal. Most of all, I couldn’t risk losing my chance to reconnect with Vera. Being the only witness to a suspicious accidental death was the last thing I needed.