The silence after he left was a living thing, vast and terrifying. Every creak of the old house settling was the sound of his return. I counted to one hundred, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird.
“Eli,” I whispered, my voice a raw croak. “Eli, can you hear me?”
A faint groan was his reply.
“Listen to my voice. Just my voice,” I said, trying to keep the tremor out of mine. “We’re going to play a game. It’s called the Quiet Game. The quietest game ever. Can you do that for me?”
“Okay, Mom,” he mumbled, his voice thick with the drug. “But my head feels… fuzzy.”
“I know, baby. We need to get the yucky food out. I need you to crawl. Crawl to the guest bathroom. Can you do that?”
He was my son. My brave, smart boy. He started to move, his limbs clumsy and uncooperative. I followed, dragging my own useless legs behind me like sacks of wet sand. The journey down the ten-foot hallway felt like crossing a desert.
Inside the bathroom, I locked the door and turned on the tap, the sound of rushing water a pathetic shield. I knelt by the toilet, my body still fighting me.
“Okay, honey. We need to be brave now. We have to make ourselves sick.”
I showed him how, forcing my fingers down my own throat until my body convulsed, purging the poison in violent, heaving waves. Eli, his face pale and streaked with tears of pain and confusion, followed my lead. It was the most horrific and necessary thing I had ever had to ask of my child.
Slowly, agonizingly, feeling began to return to my limbs, replaced by a bone-deep ache. My mind, though foggy, was clearing. I reached for my phone. Dead. Not a low battery, but completely, utterly lifeless. The landline in the hall—also dead. The cords neatly severed. Jared hadn’t just been opportunistic; he had been meticulous.
“We have to go,” I said, my voice gaining a hard-edged strength. “We go now.”
I grabbed the heavy Maglite from under the sink, my only weapon. We crept through the house, a house that was no longer our home but a crime scene. I bypassed the front door, heading for the garage. I pulled the manual release cord, and the groan of the heavy door sliding up the tracks sounded like a scream in the silent night.
Peeking out, I saw an empty driveway. A dark, silent street. He was gone.
“Miss Leverne’s,” I whispered, pointing to our neighbor’s house across the lawn. “Run as fast as you can. Don’t look back. Go!”
Eli ran. Barefoot and unsteady, he sprinted across the damp grass, a small, desperate figure under the cold moonlight. I hobbled after him, the flashlight clutched in my hand, my head swiveling, scanning the darkness for any sign of Jared’s car returning.
By the time I reached her porch, Eli was pounding on the door. Miss Leverne, a retired army colonel in her seventies with a gaze that could stop a charging bull, swung the door open. Her eyes, sharp and intelligent, took in our disheveled state, our pale faces, our terror.
“Naomi? Eli? Good Lord, what happened?” she demanded.
“He poisoned us,” I gasped, the words tumbling out. “Jared. He tried to kill us.”
Her face, for a fraction of a second, registered shock. Then it hardened into a mask of pure, unadulterated resolve.
“Get inside. Both of you,” she commanded, pulling us in and slamming the deadbolt. “You’re safe now. I’ve got you.” She was already on the phone, her voice to the 911 operator as calm and clear as a bell.
Within minutes, the night exploded with the wail of sirens. We were alive. But this was far from over.
The hospital was a blur of fluorescent lights, calm-voiced doctors, and grim-faced police officers. The toxicology report confirmed it: a massive dose of a fast-acting benzodiazepine, crushed into the mashed potatoes. Enough to cause respiratory failure in a child Eli’s size.
“You were lucky,” the doctor said, his face kind. “You getting it out of your systems so quickly… it saved your lives.”
It wasn’t luck. It was a mother’s will to live.
They caught Jared at the airport, trying to board a one-way flight to Belize with a fake passport, a burner phone, and a duffel bag full of cash. He didn’t just have a plan; he had a whole new life waiting. The final, soul-crushing piece of the puzzle came from my sister, Alina, as we sat in the sterile hospital room, Eli finally sleeping in the bed beside me.
Her face was a mask of guilt and heartbreak. “Naomi… I have to tell you something,” she began, her voice cracking. “Jared… he’s been having an affair. I’ve known for two months.”
The words hung in the air, heavy and poisonous. She’d seen him with another woman—younger, beautiful—and had followed them to a sleek, modern condo downtown. She hadn’t told me, hoping it was a fleeting mid-life crisis, not wanting to break my heart.
“You thought?” I whispered, a new, colder anger rising in me. “Alina, you let me live a lie. You let my son sleep under the same roof as a man who was planning to erase him.”
But it was never just about the affair. The police uncovered the rest. The woman was the sole heir to a vast shipping fortune, with one bizarre condition in her father’s will: she would only inherit if she married a man with a clean slate—no children, no prior marital debts. Jared wasn’t just leaving us. He was liquidating his past. We were a liability to be removed, a loose end to be snipped, so he could step into a new, unencumbered life of unimaginable wealth.
He pleaded not guilty, but the evidence was a mountain he couldn’t climb. He is now serving a life sentence with no possibility of parole.
Three months have passed. Eli and I are living with Alina, navigating the awkward, painful path toward forgiveness and a new normal. Eli is in therapy. He rarely mentions his father, but sometimes, in the dead of night, I feel his small body crawl into bed with me. No words are needed. He’s just checking to make sure I’m still there, that we are still safe. We are healing, one quiet day at a time.
I look at the man in the photos from our wedding and I cannot see the monster he became. But the monster was always there, lurking behind the charming smile. The poison was in our marriage long before it was in the potatoes.
