"I brought you something," Lorraine said, appearing at my elbow at half past eight on October 6th with a steaming mug. "It's a little sleepy blend of my own. Chamomile and honey. I drink it every night, and I've slept like a baby for thirty years."
"Oh, that's sweet, but I'm fine—"
"You look worn to the bone, sweetheart." She pressed the mug into my hands. Her fingers were warm and dry. "Humor an old woman."
So I drank it.
It tasted like chamomile and honey, with something faintly bitter underneath that I decided was the tea bag. I slept eleven hours. When I woke, the sun was blinding, my mouth was dry as paper, and my head felt stuffed with wet cotton.
"You were out cold!" Derek called cheerfully from the kitchen. "Mom's tea is magic."
The second night, I drank it again.
The third night, I did not want to. But Derek was watching from the doorway, and Lorraine's face was so hopeful, and refusing felt so rude, and I thought, It's just tea.
By the end of the first week I had stopped tasting the bitterness at all.
The first strange morning was October 10th.
"Nora." Derek was sitting at the kitchen island when I came downstairs, his coffee untouched. His voice was low and careful. "Do you remember last night?"
"Last night?"
"You came downstairs around two. I heard something and found you standing at the stove. The burner was on, Nora. High. You didn't have a pan on it."
I stared at him.
"I turned it off," he said gently. "I walked you back to bed. You kept asking what day it was. Do you really not remember?"
I did not remember.
I stood in my own kitchen and looked at the stove, at the knobs I'd turned ten thousand times, and I felt my stomach fall the way it does in an elevator.
"I'm sure it was nothing," Derek said. "You've been under so much stress since your dad. It happens."
"Did I say anything?"
"You said you were looking for something." He shrugged, and gave me a soft, worried smile. "You didn't say what."
Nobody had told me to be afraid yet. But I remember that morning as the first time I understood that a person can be gaslit by kindness. He wasn't yelling. He wasn't accusing me. He was being gentle.
And that gentleness made it impossible to argue with.