Monica sits on the edge of his mattress. Her weight shifts the bed toward her.
"I know what you've been doing." Her voice is soft, almost gentle, almost loving. "You and that woman, digging around in things that don't concern you."
Will doesn't respond. His heart pounds so loud he's sure she can hear it through his chest.
"You think you're clever, don't you?" Monica leans closer. Her breath is warm against his face. "But you're just a child, and children don't win against adults. That's not how the real world works." She straightens up, smooths her dress over her knees, looks at him with eyes that hold no warmth at all. "Your daddy chose me, not you. And if you keep making trouble, keep spreading lies..." Her voice drops to a whisper. "...you're going to end up all alone. No daddy, no family, no nobody. Just like me."
She stands, walks to the door, pauses. "Sleep tight, sweetie."
The door clicks shut. Will saves the recording with trembling fingers: 5 days. He has 5 days to save his father's life.
Three days before the wedding. Will sits on his bed in darkness.
The iPad screen has gone black. The notebook lies closed on his desk, filled with observations that no one will read. Outside his window, crickets sing their endless summer song. Indifferent to his despair, he feels emptied out, hollowed, like someone has reached inside him and scooped out everything that matters, leaving only the shell of a boy behind.
He picks up his mother's photograph from the nightstand, studies her face in the pale light filtering through the curtains: her smile, wide and genuine, the kind that made everyone around her feel important; her eyes, warm brown and full of the love she had for him; her hand resting on his shoulder in the picture, steady and sure and always there when he needed her.
"I tried, Mama." His voice barely makes a sound in the quiet room. "I tried everything I could think of. Nobody believes me. Dad thinks I'm crazy. Monica is going to win."
He remembers her last days with painful clarity: the hospital room that smelled like industrial cleaner and dying flowers; the machines that beeped and hummed in steady rhythm, keeping count of heartbeats that were running out; her hand in his growing lighter every single day, the bones more visible beneath paper-thin skin. Take care of daddy for me, baby. Promise me. The words echo in his mind, carved there forever.
"But Daddy doesn't want to be taken care of." Tears slide down Will's cheeks now, hot and unstoppable, dripping onto his mother's photographed face. "He wants her. He chose her over me, over you, over everything."
He cries like he hasn't cried since the funeral 18 months ago—deep, shaking sobs that he muffles with his pillow so nobody hears. The kind of crying that steals your breath and leaves you gasping. The kind that feels like it might never stop, like there's an ocean of grief inside him and it's all pouring out at once.
Maybe he should give up. Maybe he's wrong about everything. Maybe Monica really is just a woman who's had terrible luck with husbands, twice widowed through genuine tragedy, and Will is just a grieving child who can't accept that his father deserves to find happiness again. Maybe his mother would be disappointed in him. Maybe she'd tell him to stop causing trouble, to accept Monica, to let his father move on with his life.
The thought cuts deeper than anything Monica has ever said.
He lies in the darkness for what feels like hours. The house settles around him, creaking with age and memory. Somewhere down the hall, Monica laughs at something Wesley says. They sound happy together. They sound like a couple in love. Maybe they are. Maybe Will is the problem.
His phone buzzes on the nightstand. The screen glows bright in the darkness: 2:17 a.m. Denise.
Will almost doesn't answer. Almost lets it ring out to voicemail. Almost gives in to the exhaustion and the doubt and the crushing weight of being a 10-year-old child fighting against the entire adult world.
But he made a promise to his dying mother. And promises are sacred things.
He picks up the phone. "Hello?"
"Will." Denise's voice is urgent, breathless, alive with something that sounds like hope. "I know it's late. I know you must be exhausted, but I need you to listen very carefully. I got the test results back."
Will sits up in bed, suddenly wide awake. "Test results? What test?"
A pause. He hears Denise take a breath. "Last week when I came to your house for dinner, remember? Monica wasn't home yet." Denise speaks carefully, precisely. "While I was getting water in the kitchen, I took a small sample from the lemonade pitcher, the one Monica makes special for your father every morning."
The results came back an hour ago, and they changed everything.
Denise reads the toxicology report over the phone, her voice steady and clinical: "Ethylene glycol detected in the sample. Concentration is low, consistent with gradual, chronic exposure over a period of several months."
Will grips the phone so hard his knuckles ache. "What does that mean? What is ethylene glycol?"
"It's antifreeze, Will. The green liquid people put in car radiators to keep engines from overheating." Denise's voice is calm, but carries the weight of what she's saying. "It has a sweet taste, almost like candy. You can't detect it in something like lemonade or sweet tea. In small doses taken regularly over time, it destroys your kidneys and your liver. It mimics other medical conditions: fatigue, stomach pain, nausea, confusion. Doctors miss it constantly because they're not looking for it."
Will thinks of his father: the endless stomach pains that no medication could fix, the bone-deep tiredness that sleep never cured, the way Wesley has looked thinner, grayer, older with each passing week.
"She's poisoning him."
"Yes. Slowly and deliberately, the same way she likely poisoned Gerald Foster. The same way she probably poisoned Raymond Ellis. Your father is next on her list, and the wedding would seal his fate."
Will is already out of bed, pacing the small length of his room in the darkness. "We have to call the police right now, tonight! They have to arrest her before the wedding!"
Denise sighs heavily. "I already called Detective Harris at Atlanta Police Department. Told him everything we found, and... he said the sample could be contaminated. I collected it from your refrigerator without authorization, without proper chain of custody, without documentation. A defense attorney would tear it apart in court. He said he needs more concrete evidence before he can make any arrests."
"The wedding is in 3 days!" Will's voice rises with panic, cracking on the last word.