She couldn’t sit here, do nothing. They all wanted her to leave, to go home. Then what? All she had were Watkins’s promises.

No, she thought. No way.

She sent one last text before heading back to Hastings. Another lie to her father. I’ll be home tonight.

Chapter Forty-five

Day eighteen

Coffee is bitter. On this morning it was bittersweet.

I hear him call out from the kitchen.

“Alice!”

She looks at me with a new face. I don’t give it a name. It is a face of terror.

She knew what I was doing. She helped me do it. Now it is real.

“Alice!”

I nod at her. I motion for her to go to him and she obeys me.

Yes, that’s right, I think. She obeys me.

He cries out now, in pain. In agony. And even as I try to feel joy that his cells are suffocating, the sound of human suffering is difficult to take. My heart pounds against the walls of my chest. My vision blurs for just a second as my body adjusts to the fear that his cries provoke. As a member of the same herd, the instinct cannot be suppressed.

She comes back to me now, feet pounding the floor, voice calling out.

“He’s sick! He’s lying on the floor! He’s throwing up!”

I picture the vomit, his body trying to rid itself of the poison.

I try to calm her down. I lie. “He’s going to be all right. It will be a few hours, but he will be fine. You can bring him some towels and some water. Turn him on his back.”

The water will make more vomit. If he’s on his back, maybe he’ll choke on the vomit. Maybe that will be what kills him.

“But he didn’t have the muffin! He didn’t eat it!” she cries out, and I can see that part of her was relieved when he didn’t eat it. She is ambivalent about my plan. She is ambivalent about him.

Which is why I didn’t waste the seeds on the muffin. I couldn’t trust Alice to give it to him.

“I know, sweetheart,” I say. “But he drank his coffee, didn’t he? All of it.”

Her eyes get big now as she remembers how I had her bring me the coffee tin, and then the white filters, and then made her go back to the kitchen for a measuring spoon, the little yellow one that scoops out the coffee.

When she was gone, I put the apple seed mash beneath the filter, coating the plastic basin, then sprinkled some coffee into the filter and placed it on top. When she returned, we measured more coffee from the little yellow scoop.

She cries harder. Terror Face. I give it a name now because I am no longer reacting to it. To him, and his suffering.