But Miguel is not looking at me. He’s rooting around in the garbage, and my stomach clenches. What else has he found?
He pulls out an empty wine bottle and places it on the granite counter with a thunk.
“Albariño. Your favorite,” he says matter-of-factly.
I stare at the empty bottle. He’s right—albariño has become my favorite wine ever since a night out at the Barcelona Wine Bar last summer. I have several bottles of it sitting in the second fridge in the basement right now. But I didn’t open a bottle last night, much less drink the whole thing.
“I didn’t drink that.” I look from Miguel to Officer Jankowski, whose eyebrows are so arched they threaten to meet his hairline. “I didn’t. I haven’t had a glass of wine all week. I mean, I had two at the party, but that’s it.”
“And the shots,” Jankowski says.
“Shot. I had one shot.” I turn to Miguel. “I did not drink that wine, Miguel. You cannot think I drank that whole bottle of wine.”
“Maybe you split it with someone? Kenya?”
“No.”
“Okay, so who did drink it? The dog?”
I ignore his sarcasm. “I don’t know. Someone was obviously in here. Someone put that empty bottle in the trash.”
Miguel frowns for a moment and his mouth opens as if he’s about to say something. I can almost hear him question the absurdity of my words. Itisabsurd. Did I really think someone broke in here and put an empty bottle of my favorite wine in the trash? Miguel shuts his mouth, pulls out a phone from his back pocket, and starts typing. It takes me a second to realize he’s using my phone.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I’m checking to see what time you ordered from Millie’s. Here we go.” He reads aloud from my phone. “‘Fabian your DoorDash driver is approaching at nine forty.’”
“That’s helpful,” Officer Jankowski says. “Now we know you were in the house at nine forty when the DoorDash arrived, took it in, ate it. Maybe you took an Ambien a little while later, before you went to bed.”
“No, that’s not what happened.” A shiver runs down my spine. I grab my phone and read the texts for myself. It’s all there in black and white. “I didn’t order DoorDash. And I would remember eating an entire Cliff Road salad. I would remember taking an Ambien.”
“You don’t know that, mi amor.” Miguel’s voice is gentle. “Remember what the doctor said? You can lose memories from before the trauma, not just after.”
“People sleepwalk on Ambien, did you know that?” Jankowski says. “It’s a real problem. Some even drive. We had a woman in Rockville last year who sleep-drove on Ambien and crashed into her neighbor’s car. Luckily, no one was hurt.” He shuts his notebook.
“Why are you doing that?” I ask. “Closing your notebook?”
“I think we have everything we need.”
“No, you don’t,” I insist.
“Look, if your memory comes back, we’ll be back,” Jankowski says. “Or if the tox screen results come back positive. We’re not closing this—it’s an open investigation.”
But he is closing it. I can feel the shift in the room. I’m just another pill-popping, wine-sloshed, middle-aged Karen in his eyes. Nothing to see here; let’s move along.
“Look, I don’t know what happened last night,” I say, a rushing sound filling my ears. “But I would never take an Ambien if I had been drinking. I am very careful about that.” I grab the bottle of wine and turn it over in my hand, examining the blue-and-gold label as if it might give me answers. “And I definitely did not drink this bottle of wine. I think someone else did. Can we fingerprint this?”
I look up in time to see Miguel and Officer Jankowski exchange a look.
Not an unkind look, quite the opposite. A look of concern. The look of caregivers who have been tasked with handling someone who’s losing their grip on reality, someone who insists that it’s 1985 and Reagan is president.
And it hits me. Officer Jankowski doesn’t believe me, and neither does my own husband.
FOURTEEN MONTHS AGO
Wednesdays were the hardest day of the week for Tori. She was struggling to focus on the patient in front of her, a woman about ten years older than she was and terrified that she was passing her own eating disorder to her daughter.
“She saw me weighing myself for the second time in one day. I didn’t know she was home. I wouldn’t have stepped on the scale if she was.” Tori’s patient brought her fist to her mouth and shook her head.
