THE FATEFUL PILL

I was discharged ten days later, still physically weak but far steadier in spirit than Dr. Whitcombe had predicted.

The first thing I did when I got home wasn’t rest, it was open the small notebook I’d kept hidden in my desk drawer for years, where I’d recorded every instance of Oliver’s odd behaviour around my medication, starting with the incident when I was fourteen.

I called Freddie myself, not asking my mother to do it for me, dialling the number myself, because I knew she’d be more at ease talking directly to me than to a panicked adult.

“Isabelle,” Freddie said over the phone, her voice still shaky.

“Are you all right? I’m sorry, I didn’t run fast enough—”

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I said, getting straight to the point.

“I need you to tell me exactly what you saw and heard that day. Everything, don’t leave anything out, even things you think don’t matter.”

I arranged to meet Freddie alone, no other adults in the room, just the two of us sitting in my bedroom, and I let her tell me everything, but I didn’t let her wander off track.

“That morning, before we went riding, I saw Oliver standing near the tree where your jacket was hanging, for a long time, longer than usual,” Freddie recounted, her eyes fixed on her cup.

“I didn’t think anything of it at the time. But the night you were admitted to hospital, while everyone was panicking, I heard Oliver talking to himself, very quietly, sitting alone in a corner of the hospital corridor, saying ‘I just wanted to see if she was really sick, I didn’t think it would get this bad.'”

I sat still, feeling as though an important piece had just clicked into place, but I knew a twelve-year-old’s account wouldn’t carry enough weight against an adult as fiercely in denial as Aunt Vivienne.

“Would you be willing to write down exactly what you just told me, and sign it?” I asked, my voice gentle but serious.

“I won’t use it if you don’t agree, and I’ll be there if anyone tries to frighten you for telling the truth.”

Freddie nodded, her eyes red but resolute.

“I’ll do it, Isabelle. Oliver shouldn’t get to do that to you and walk away from it.”

I carefully filed the paper Freddie had written into a new folder I’d started building, next to my old notebook, and I realized this was only the first piece.

I needed something that couldn’t be argued away with words, visual proof, or a physical object, something that could be laid on the table in front of the whole family, something no one could dismiss as “the imagination of a frightened child.”

I thought of the security camera system around Alderbury Hall that Mrs. Pruitt, the estate’s longtime housekeeper, still managed, and I knew that was where I needed to go next.