Chase left for good in August. His girlfriend wanted a baby, he’d informed her during their final blowout. Two, if possible. Bianca was thirty-five, and her clock was ticking. The news shook Harriett almost as much as the video. She and Chase had agreed early on that they wouldn’t have children. She’d always thought that was one of the things that bound them as a couple. Maybe Chase had meant it back then. Or perhaps, Harriett realized, he just hadn’t been in a rush. After all, her body was the one on a schedule. He had all the time in the world. Now they were both forty-eight, and she saw in his eyes that he truly wanted a child. That was the moment she let him go.
Over the two months that followed, Harriett moved through the world by rote. She stuck to a schedule at first: wake, work, sleep, repeat. A few weeks passed, and the routine began to break down. She stopped sleeping, which meant no more waking. She took three weeks off work and watched her garden go to seed. The grass grew so high that she had to wade through it. Flowers that couldn’t keep up perished from lack of sunlight. Colonies of iridescent scarab beetles flew from plant to plant, devouring their victims’ leaves and leaving lacy skeletons behind. A hawk dropped the disemboweled carcass of a squirrel at her feet, and a coyote stopped to sniff at her late one night. By the time Harriett walked off the job on the thirtieth of October, the garden had almost completed its transformation. On the morning of November first, she looked out her window and saw what it wanted to be. For the rest of the winter, she shut herself off from the world outside and began her own metamorphosis.
Harriett paused to stroke the leaves of a philodendron that had recently poisoned the neighbor’s cat. It hadn’t acted out of malice. There was no evil in the natural world. There was pleasure and pain and life and death. The plant had made the cat sick so it would nibble and piss somewhere else. It was an act of survival, nothing more. What she’d done to Jackson was no different. Maybe he would live. Maybe he wouldn’t. Either way, he knew who was responsible. He’d fucked with the wrong female, and he’d think twice before he messed with a woman again.
Harriett’s next pupil was parked across the street from her house. He’d been there for hours, waiting for Eric’s car to pull out of her drive. Harding’s bodyguard thought he was clever. He assumed no one had seen him. Harriett had been aware of his presence the entire time. As long as he kept his distance, Harriett didn’t give a damn. He could watch all he wanted. She had nothing to hide. But she knew he wouldn’t stay away, and so she’d been waiting for him to arrive.
A car door opened and closed softly. She heard shoes walking up her drive. The footsteps paused when the man reached the brambles and searched for a way through them. She watched from the shadows as he emerged in her garden. A thorn had scratched a long, red line across his thick neck, and a trickle of blood fed a growing stain on his collar. She enjoyed the way his eyes bulged as they took in his surroundings. He headed for the door of the house, which stood open. She didn’t try to stop him from entering. She didn’t waste time wondering what he would have done if he’d come across her inside.
Not long after, he stepped back through the doorway and into the garden. From behind him, Harriett reached out and gently brushed the side of his neck where the thorn had left a gash. His fingers instantly flew to the wound and came away covered with a thick green substance along with his own blood.
“Did you find what you were looking for in my house, Mr. Chertov?” Harriett asked.
He tried to go for the weapon hidden under his jacket, but his muscles were no longer obeying orders. Harriett took the gun and tossed it aside just before his knees buckled and he hit the ground.
She kneeled down beside the man. “Don’t struggle. You’ve just received a large dose of conium. As it is, you don’t have much time until the paralysis reaches your heart,” she warned him. “Tell me why you’re here, and I’ll consider administering the antidote.”
There wasn’t an antidote, of course. But he didn’t know that.
Going Rogue
Jo sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and underwear. She’d turned the air-conditioning up to full blast and thrown an extra blanket over her sleeping husband. Her half of the bed was a swamp, and the sheets would need to be washed again in the morning. Her pillow, like so many before it, would likely end up stuffed in the trash.