\u2026 my best friend, Chloe.<\/p>\n
The sterile hum of the life support machine faded into a deafening silence. My hands trembled as I gripped the worn leather of David’s journal. My husband of five years. The man currently lying motionless in the ICU bed beside me, his skin bruised and pale against the stark white hospital sheets.<\/p>\n
I had opened the diary hoping to feel close to him, expecting to find mundane reflections or perhaps financial worries. Instead, I found a meticulous, frantic obsession.<\/p>\n
Page after page detailed her schedule, her nervous habits, the cloying scent of her signature vanilla perfume. He wrote about his heart pounding out of his chest when she walked through our front door. He wrote about the icy terror that gripped him every time she poured me a glass of wine.<\/p>\n
Wait. Poured me a glass of wine?<\/p>\n
My stomach dropped. I wiped away the tears of betrayal that had begun to blur my vision and forced myself to focus on the frantic scrawl of his handwriting. The entries weren’t the confessions of a man embroiled in a forbidden affair.<\/p>\n
They were surveillance logs.<\/p>\n
October 12th: She brought over her homemade soup again tonight. I managed to switch Sarah\u2019s bowl with mine when Chloe went to the bathroom. My heart was racing. I’m terrified of what she’s capable of, but the adrenaline of finally catching her in the act is keeping me awake. I need undeniable proof before I go to the police. If I tell Sarah now, she’ll never believe her own best friend is slowly poisoning her.<\/p>\n
The journal slipped from my numb fingers, landing with a soft thud on the linoleum floor.<\/p>\n
The pieces fell into place with sickening clarity. My chronic, unexplained fatigue. The sudden, agonizing migraines I’d suffered for the past six months. The doctors who could never find anything wrong. David hadn’t been sneaking around with Chloe; he had been trying to save my life.<\/p>\n
I looked up at David’s battered face. The police report stated his car had been violently run off the road late at night by an unidentified dark SUV.<\/p>\n
Chloe drove a dark grey Tahoe.<\/p>\n
Before I could fully process the suffocating horror of it all, the heavy hospital door clicked and creaked open.<\/p>\n
“Hey, sweetie,” a soft, familiar voice cooed.<\/p>\n
Chloe stepped into the dim room, holding two steaming paper cups from the cafeteria. Her eyes darted quickly to the life support monitor, then settled on me, a perfectly practiced, sorrowful smile stretching across her face.<\/p>\n
“I brought you your favorite,” she said, stepping closer and holding out a cup of tea. “You need to keep your strength up.”<\/p>\n
I slowly slid my foot over David’s fallen journal, silently kicking it under the hospital bed. I looked up into the eyes of the woman who was trying to kill me\u2014the woman who had put my husband in a coma to stop him from exposing her.<\/p>\n
I forced my lips to curl into a grateful, exhausted smile.<\/p>\n
“Thank you, Chloe,” I whispered, reaching out to take the cup. “I really don’t know what I’d do without you.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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