I found Maggie upstairs, folded into a guest bed like someone had poured her there and forgotten to come back. Her skin had the color of old paper left in a hot car. When the paramedics arrived, they spoke in quiet, practiced code, and I watched their eyes the way I’d watched suspects for thirty-one years. Benzodiazepines, the doctor said later, enough to shut down a body if given time and silence. She wasn’t prescribed any. The neighbor across the street had seen her collapse three days earlier, had called 911, had watched my son turn the paramedics away with a signature and a lie. At the station, when I laid out the motive, the debts, the old life insurance policy on my wife’s name, the detective listened like someone assembling a weapon piece by piece. Then the lab found crushed Xanax in Maggie’s teacup, Brittany’s online order, Brittany’s searches about dosage and death, and every dandelion promise I’d ever made my son shriveled into some other, ugli… Continues…