Could it be that easy? Odilie continued watching the clouds on the guest bedroom’s ceiling. She could swear they were floating, moving like real clouds in a real sky. She turned to Penelope and watched her breathe in and out. Her heart alive and beating. Like Tom’s, like her own.

She wasn’t actually going to do it. Of course not. It was just a happy little film that played on repeat in her brain at all times. When she closed her eyes, she could feel herself getting into the rhythm of it, embodying the other Odilie, the one who would so tactfully kill her husband, inherit his money, mourn with crocodile tears. It made her smile, this movie. Smile so hard that it brought her outside, into the sunlight, for one of the first times since she arrived in Michigan.

She didn’t want it to be bloody. She resented Tom; she maybe even hated him. But she didn’t abhor him enough to wish a painful death on him. No, she would do something simple, something that would lull him into a deep, dreamless forever sleep. Carbon monoxide poisoning. A simple solution, as Vera had said.

Before she even got back to Brooklyn, she had it all planned out. He spent every evening in his home office, that dungeon of a room that she never even went near. Sometimes he even slept there. Windowless. Soundproof. With a gas fireplace to make him feel like he was some medieval king with roaring, royal flames that she knew he kept on every night until May. Before he went in there for the night, she would finagle that fireplace so that once it was turned on, carbon monoxide would filter out. He would be trapped in there, while she and Penelope would sleep peacefully on the other side of the house, none the wiser. He wouldn’t even realize what was happening to him until maybe the last moment before he lost consciousness.

Still, it was just a movie in her head. It wasn’t until Tom, so casually cruel, had said that thing about Vera MacDonald that a fissure seemed to crack wide open in Odilie’s head, that she felt a tremor of herself floating away, a dust mote in the sunlight. She was sane, she had always been sane, steady, sad and a little lonely, but with a firm grip on reality. She knew the Vera voice in her head was her own, for example. But after that admission, God, she wanted him to die. Harder than she’d wanted almost anything, than even Tom himself, when she had first seen him and fell so stupidly in love.