Chapter 3 - The Forged Prescription
Lila talked for an hour that morning, her voice low and fast, while I hid in the backseat of my Honda in the Whole Foods parking lot, pretending to answer work emails. She told me about meeting Daniel at a hospital fundraiser in 2017, about his charm, his stories about his “sick mother” who needed a place to stay, about how he’d convinced her to buy the Capitol Hill row house in her name only, “to protect it from his ex-wife’s lawyers.” She told me about the fog that settled over her brain after he started making her “special tea” every night, about the psychiatrist she’d never met who’d signed papers saying she was schizophrenic, about waking up in her car on the side of the parkway, the brake line cut, the engine smoking, and realizing if she’d been going five miles an hour faster, she’d have wrapped the car around a tree.
“I faked my death,” she said, and I heard her take a drag of a cigarette. “Left my wallet in the car, left a suicide note in the glove box, moved to a tiny apartment in Baltimore under my grandma’s maiden name. I couldn’t go to the cops. Margaret’s cousin is a detective in the third district. He’d have buried the case before I even finished giving my statement.”
She gave me the name of a private investigator she’d used back then, a retired cop named Jake who owed her a favor, and the address of a storage unit in Alexandria where she’d stashed copies of the forged papers Daniel had used on her. “Don’t trust anyone,” she said, right before she hung up. “Not the cops, not your friends, not even the nice old man who called you. Everyone has a price. And Daniel and Margaret have enough of your dad’s money to pay it.”
I drove straight from the parking lot to the storage unit, my hands white on the steering wheel. The unit was full of boxes—old clothes, medical bills, a stack of forged prescriptions in Lila’s name, all signed by a Dr. Eleanor Hale. The same Dr. Hale Daniel had mentioned in the recording. The same Dr. Hale who was supposed to sign my competency papers.
I grabbed the stack of prescriptions, tucking them into my bag next to Thomas’s flash drive, and drove home. I had to know if they’d already planted mine.
I waited until Daniel and Margaret left for their “weekly lunch” at the Cheesecake Factory—their code, I now knew, for meeting Dr. Hale at a bar in Dupont Circle—and tore the house apart. I checked the medicine cabinet, the junk drawer in the kitchen, the filing cabinet in the office. Nothing. I was just about to give up and call Jake the PI when I remembered the fake bottom in my jewelry box, the one Dad had built for me when I was a teenager to hide my diary from boys.
I pried it open with a bobby pin.
Inside, under my grandmother’s pearl necklace, was a prescription bottle. My name on the label. Quetiapine 300mg, take one at bedtime for bipolar disorder. Refills: 5. Doctor: Eleanor Hale, MD. Pharmacy: the CVS on M Street, filled three days prior.
I’d never heard of quetiapine. I’d never been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I’d never even met Dr. Hale.
I sank onto the bed, the bottle cold in my hand, and thought about the nightly chamomile tea Daniel made me, the way he’d stand there watching me drink every last sip, the fog I’d been waking up with for months, the way I’d blamed it on grief, on moving stress, on being 39 and tired. He hadn’t just been planning to lie about my mental health. He’d been drugging me to make the lies true.
That afternoon, I called Thomas. He came over with a duffel bag full of tiny, wireless security cameras—“the same ones I used in the house, military grade, undetectable”—and helped me plant them in every room. One behind the bookshelf in the office, one in the vent above the kitchen table, one in the smoke detector in the master bedroom, one in the fake rose bush Margaret had insisted on planting by the front door.
“These stream to a server in Iceland,” he said, tapping his laptop as he finished the last one. “They can’t find them, they can’t turn them off, they can’t erase the footage. If they so much as look at your prescription bottle wrong, we’ll have it on tape.”
He left an hour later, just as Daniel and Margaret pulled into the driveway. I tucked the forged prescription back into the jewelry box, wiped my face, and walked into the kitchen to greet them, a soft smile on my face.
Margaret was carrying a stack of manila folders, her face flushed with excitement. “We had the best lunch,” she said, dropping the folders on the kitchen table. “Dr. Hale is such a lovely woman. She’s agreed to come over next week for a little chat, just to make sure you’re adjusting to the new house okay.”
I poured myself a glass of iced tea, my hand steady now. “That sounds wonderful,” I said, glancing at the vent above the table where the camera was hidden, red light blinking silently. “I can’t wait to meet her.”
May you like
Margaret smiled, but her eyes were cold as she looked at the jewelry box peeking out from the bedroom doorway. “Did you find everything you were looking for in the attic this morning, sweetheart?” she asked, her voice sweet as poison. “I saw you creeping up there. I hope you didn’t lose anything important.”
I froze for half a second, then took a slow sip of tea, smiling back. “Just old photo albums,” I said. “Nothing important at all.”
