That changed the day she discovered her husband was fucking the head of his production department. She’d known plenty of women who’d suspected their husbands were unfaithful. She’d listened to their Nancy Drew tales of marital espionage. Harriett hadn’t spent months following Chase. She hadn’t installed spyware on his phone. She’d assumed their relationship was mutually beneficial, and trusted him not to fuck it up. It had never occurred to her to question his whereabouts. Then his lover grew tired of playing second fiddle and sent a video to Harriett’s phone.
She’d locked her office door and watched every second of it—from the moment the two had entered the frame, attached at the mouth and frantically fumbling to remove the clothing between them. She’d seen the woman get down on her hands and knees with Harriett’s husband behind her. She heard the woman gasp as his penis slid inside her and listened to her husband pant as he pumped faster and faster. Harriett watched fifteen minutes of furious lovemaking followed by an hour and twenty-one minutes of stillness as the two slept, wrapped in each other’s arms. It wasn’t their first encounter. It wasn’t even their tenth. They were comfortable with each other. Harriett knew they’d been doing what she was witnessing for a very long time.
When Harriett pressed play, her world had seemed solid, sturdy, dependable. By the time the video ended, she was surrounded by rubble. She wandered through the wreckage for months, distraught and disoriented. She no longer believed in anything.
Chase left for good in August. His girlfriend wanted a baby, he’d informed her during their final blowout. Two, if possible. Bianca was thirty-five, and her clock was ticking. The news shook Harriett almost as much as the video. She and Chase had agreed early on that they wouldn’t have children. She’d always thought that was one of the things that bound them as a couple. Maybe Chase had meant it back then. Or perhaps, Harriett realized, he just hadn’t been in a rush. After all, her body was the one on a schedule. He had all the time in the world. Now they were both forty-eight, and she saw in his eyes that he truly wanted a child. That was the moment she let him go.
Over the two months that followed, Harriett moved through the world by rote. She stuck to a schedule at first: wake, work, sleep, repeat. A few weeks passed, and the routine began to break down. She stopped sleeping, which meant no more waking. She took three weeks off work and watched her garden go to seed. The grass grew so high that she had to wade through it. Flowers that couldn’t keep up perished from lack of sunlight. Colonies of iridescent scarab beetles flew from plant to plant, devouring their victims’ leaves and leaving lacy skeletons behind. A hawk dropped the disemboweled carcass of a squirrel at her feet, and a coyote stopped to sniff at her late one night. By the time Harriett walked off the job on the thirtieth of October, the garden had almost completed its transformation. On the morning of November first, she looked out her window and saw what it wanted to be. For the rest of the winter, she shut herself off from the world outside and began her own metamorphosis.
Harriett paused to stroke the leaves of a philodendron that had recently poisoned the neighbor’s cat. It hadn’t acted out of malice. There was no evil in the natural world. There was pleasure and pain and life and death. The plant had made the cat sick so it would nibble and piss somewhere else. It was an act of survival, nothing more. What she’d done to Jackson was no different. Maybe he would live. Maybe he wouldn’t. Either way, he knew who was responsible. He’d fucked with the wrong female, and he’d think twice before he messed with a woman again.
Harriett’s next pupil was parked across the street from her house. He’d been there for hours, waiting for Eric’s car to pull out of her drive. Harding’s bodyguard thought he was clever. He assumed no one had seen him. Harriett had been aware of his presence the entire time. As long as he kept his distance, Harriett didn’t give a damn. He could watch all he wanted. She had nothing to hide. But she knew he wouldn’t stay away, and so she’d been waiting for him to arrive.
A car door opened and closed softly. She heard shoes walking up her drive. The footsteps paused when the man reached the brambles and searched for a way through them. She watched from the shadows as he emerged in her garden. A thorn had scratched a long, red line across his thick neck, and a trickle of blood fed a growing stain on his collar. She enjoyed the way his eyes bulged as they took in his surroundings. He headed for the door of the house, which stood open. She didn’t try to stop him from entering. She didn’t waste time wondering what he would have done if he’d come across her inside.
Not long after, he stepped back through the doorway and into the garden. From behind him, Harriett reached out and gently brushed the side of his neck where the thorn had left a gash. His fingers instantly flew to the wound and came away covered with a thick green substance along with his own blood.
“Did you find what you were looking for in my house, Mr. Chertov?” Harriett asked.
He tried to go for the weapon hidden under his jacket, but his muscles were no longer obeying orders. Harriett took the gun and tossed it aside just before his knees buckled and he hit the ground.
She kneeled down beside the man. “Don’t struggle. You’ve just received a large dose of conium. As it is, you don’t have much time until the paralysis reaches your heart,” she warned him. “Tell me why you’re here, and I’ll consider administering the antidote.”
There wasn’t an antidote, of course. But he didn’t know that.
Going Rogue
Jo sat cross-legged on her bedroom floor, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and underwear. She’d turned the air-conditioning up to full blast and thrown an extra blanket over her sleeping husband. Her half of the bed was a swamp, and the sheets would need to be washed again in the morning. Her pillow, like so many before it, would likely end up stuffed in the trash.
Jo could feel the icy air swirling around her, but it offered little relief from the waves of heat. Before waking up drenched in sweat, she’d dreamed she was tied to a stake with flames lapping at her bare shins. She’d watched the hem of her white dress catch fire. Within seconds, her entire body was ablaze. Jo knew the dream well. For years, she’d lived in fear of it. Only in recent months had she begun to understand it. Now when the dream came, she let herself burn. Heat was energy, and energy, power. She wondered if she could learn to control it—to channel the fury and indignation that fueled it. She wanted to find out exactly what she could do.
With her eyes closed, Jo envisioned a brilliant blue orb of energy hovering above the palms she held cupped in her lap. She’d just set it spinning when a sound from another room broke her concentration—the faint whoosh of a window rising. Her eyes opened and the orb vanished. She was on her feet in an instant.
“Art.” Jo shook her husband. He answered with a snore. “Art!”
“What?” he mumbled.
“Shhh! There’s someone in the house. Call 911.”
“Where are you going?” he asked, struggling to sit up.
Jo padded toward the door in her bare feet. “To get Lucy.”