“Did she know your husband was traveling?”
“Yes.”
“Did she know you were alone?”
“Yes.”
“Did she know about your diet?”
I hesitated.
“She knew we had stopped eating sugar.
Andrew mentioned it at dinner last week.”
The detective leaned back slightly.
“Then why send a cake?”
I had no answer.
Andrew entered the apartment before midnight.
He had come directly from the hospital, still wearing the same navy suit he had traveled in.
His tie was loose, and his face looked older than it had that morning.
The detectives had asked him to meet us there.
“Lucy woke up for a few seconds,” he said.
I stood immediately.
“Did she speak?”
“She asked for water.
Then she fell asleep again.”
Relief moved through me, followed by another sharp wave of fear.
Andrew looked at the evidence bag on the table.
“What is that?”
“Your mother’s card,” the detective said.
Andrew’s expression hardened.
“My mother is at the hospital.
Her daughter almost died.
Why are you treating her like a suspect?”
The detective gave him the timeline.
Sophia’s FaceTime call.
Her scream.
Lucy’s later collapse.
The courier pickup from Sophia’s townhouse.
Andrew listened without interrupting.
When the detective finished, he looked at me.
“Why didn’t you tell me she called before Lucy got sick?”
“I tried.
Your mother took the phone and told you I poisoned her.”
He remembered.
I saw it happen in his eyes.
Sophia’s accusation had been so immediate, so forceful, that no one had stopped to ask how she knew there was anything wrong with the cake.
Andrew sat across from me.
“She said you must have done something after it arrived.”
“I sent it away almost immediately.”
“You opened it.”
His words struck harder than I expected.
The detective intervened.
“The inner acetate collar around the cake was already disturbed before Mrs.
Carmen Velasco received it.
The bakery uses a numbered seal beneath its ribbon.
That seal had been cut and repositioned.”
Andrew stared at him.
“Are you saying someone tampered with it?”
“We’re saying the cake did not leave the bakery in the condition in which it reached Lucy.”
The hospital’s preliminary toxicology report arrived shortly after midnight.
A dangerous non-food compound had been detected in Lucy’s blood.
