Free Fed up by Jessica Conant-Park, Susan Conant

returned, he’d just have to use another bathroom. Where was Leo, anyway? Someone had said that he’d ridden in the ambulance that had transported Francie—or Francie’s body—to the hospital. I hadn’t seen him there. Shouldn’t he be home by now? Maybe he simply couldn’t bear to return home without his wife?
    I drove us back to my condo in Brighton. It was a one-bedroom on the third and top floor of what had originally been a large one-family house. My unit had a big bedroom, a small living room, a cramped kitchen, and a tiny bathroom, but I’d never before been so happy to be in the safety of my own little home. Josh made another trip down to the car to bring up the cooking equipment he had so excitedly used only hours earlier, and I put on water for tea. I wasn’t much of a tea drinker, and neither was Josh, but I felt chilled and weak, and the idea of tea felt comforting.
    Josh returned, placed a cardboard box and his knife bag in a corner of my living room, and collapsed onto the couch. He ran both hands through his hair and held them there, disbelief plastered across his face. “This cannot have happened. This cannot have happened,” he kept repeating. He looked up at me with concern. “God, how are you doing, Chloe?”
    I put the cups of tea on the coffee table, sat down next to him, and moved in close when he put his arm around me. He wrapped his other arm around me, squeezed me against him, and rubbed the back of my head. “Not very well,” I said in a broken voice as I started to cry. “Oh, Josh,” I managed, “I was with her when she died. She couldn’t breathe right. And she was lying in her own... filth! She must have been in so much pain.” I sat up and wiped my eyes. “I can’t imagine what killed her. It must be the same thing that made everybody sick, right? I mean, the odds of the two being unrelated are... negligible. Zero.”
    My sleek, black, muscular cat, Gato, jumped onto the couch, positioned himself with his front quarters on Josh’s lap, and began purring loudly. “Hi, there, my friend.” Josh started patting Gato’s shiny coat. That darn cat, who loved Josh to pieces, fended off most of my own attempts to snuggle with him. To me, Josh said, “I’m so sorry you had to watch Francie die. And I’m sorry I wasn’t more help. I was feeling terrible, and I don’t know that I was thinking all that clearly. What a horrible thing for you to have to go through.”
    “Josh, I can’t shake the image of Francie struggling for air. And her eyes were all glassy and unfocused. What do you think happened?”
    “I’ve got one explanation for this.” He sighed. “But it’s not good.”
    “There aren’t any good explanations, so shoot. Tell me what you think,” I said with a sniffle.
    “I hate to even think it, but I wonder if Evan or Willie had something to do with it.”
    Josh’s words shook me out of my tears. “What? You think Owen’s brothers did this? What on earth—”
    “Hear me out.” He held out his hand to stop me from telling him he was out of his mind. “You know how Evan and Willie are. They’re always pulling practical jokes and goofing around. What if they thought it’d be funny to pull off a joke that ended up on television? To pull one on me? Remember when they stuck a few pieces of fish into the engine of Owen’s delivery truck? Once those things started rotting and the smell got into the driver’s area, even Owen knew that was not the normal way a seafood delivery truck should smell. They could’ve messed with the food or the wine to make me look terrible. I don’t know what they could’ve put in the food or maybe in the wine, but it’s a possibility.”
    I froze. Far from hitting me as off-the-wall, the idea struck me as hideously possible. Owen swore that his brothers had always been a lot like Fred and George, Ron Weasley’s twin brothers, but that once Evan and Willie had read the Harry Potter books, they’d deliberately modeled