Before he left the bedroom, Daniel bent over the bed, kissed my forehead, and whispered, “Poor Audrey. You never saw this coming.”
I waited until I heard the heavy front door click shut. Then, I opened my eyes. Daniel had no idea just how wrong he was. I had been waiting three weeks for this exact night.
It had started several hours earlier when he came upstairs carrying a cup of tea. “You look exhausted,” he said softly. “Drink this and get some rest.”
That alone made me instantly suspicious. Daniel never prepared tea; honestly, I wasn’t even convinced he knew where the teabags were kept. Taking the tiniest sip, I detected a slight, unfamiliar bitterness. That by itself wasn’t proof, but after months of unusual wire transfers, suspicious business trips, and phone calls that abruptly stopped whenever I entered the room, I had learned not to ignore anomalies.
So I smiled, waited until Daniel went downstairs, poured the tea into the bathroom sink, and got back into bed to play possum.
