That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept thinking about the tension on his face and wondering why he insisted that I be the only
one to eat the pie.
The following week, I began feeling weak. Sometimes I became dizzy. I felt nauseous in the mornings, and my vision
occasionally went dark while I was at work. When I told Victor, he seemed strangely relieved.
“That was expected,” he whispered.
“What was expected?”
“I told you not to worry.”
That was the first time I became genuinely afraid of him.
I remembered that Victor’s first wife had died several months before we met. He almost never spoke about her. He had only
told me that she had been ill for a long time. But what if her illness hadn’t been natural?
The thought terrified me. The more I tried to push it away, the more suspicious everything seemed. Victor’s secretive
personality. His first wife’s death.
The way he sent me out of the kitchen. The changing taste of my food. And most importantly, the fact that he never touched
the pie himself.
One morning, I decided to test him. I baked the pie and placed it on the table as usual. Victor waited for me to leave the
kitchen. But this time, I watched him through a narrow opening in the doorway. He pulled a small white container from his
pocket. He opened it, sprinkled something onto my slice, and carefully mixed it into the filling with a spoon.
My heart was beating so loudly that I was afraid he would hear it. When he called me back, I sat at the table but didn’t touch
the plate.
