The woman who held my hand at my mother’s funeral looked me straight in the eye, told our two best friends she was worried about me, and in that single moment, tried to paint me as a hysterical fool to cover her own cheating.
For thirty years, our Thursday bridge game was sacred. It was our therapy, our battlefield, our constant.
But Eleanor had been cheating for months, finessing tricks and palming aces with the slickness of a professional. When I finally called her on it, she didn’t just deny it; she masterfully turned my life, my stress, and my own insecurities into weapons to discredit me.
My friends didn’t see it, and my own husband told me I was just being competitive. She had isolated me completely, making me the problem.
She had no idea that my job restoring ancient manuscripts had taught me everything I needed to know about hidden marks, and I was about to use a little invisible ink to make her every lie shine a brilliant, damning blue.
The Subtle Tremor: The Tell-Tale Flinch
The air in Carol’s sunroom always smelled the same: lemon Pledge and old paperbacks. It was the scent of our Thursdays, a ritual as sacred as any Sunday service. For twenty-five years, the four of us—Carol, Brenda, Eleanor, and I—had gathered around a card table to slay each other with spades and diamonds. At fifty-seven, these games were less about winning and more about the simple, profound act of showing up. We were a mismatched set of life’s playing cards, bound together by decades of shared history.
Carol, the eternal peacemaker, was dealing the first hand of the afternoon. Her hands, dappled with age spots, moved with a practiced, shuffling rhythm. Brenda, whose widowhood had sharpened her wit to a razor’s edge, was already complaining about the glare from the window. And Eleanor… Eleanor was watching the cards fall with an intensity that felt new. Or maybe I was just noticing it for the first time.
“Two clubs,” I bid, sorting my hand. A decent collection of hearts, but nothing to write home about. Mark, my husband, always said I had the worst poker face; I wore my disappointment like a cheap hat.
“Pass,” Brenda grunted, taking a loud sip of her iced tea.
“Two spades,” Eleanor announced, her voice smooth as cream. She had this way of placing her cards on the table, a little flourish of the wrist that was both elegant and, I was beginning to realize, a little too deliberate.
The bidding continued, a familiar back-and-forth. It was during the second trick that I saw it. A flicker. Eleanor reached for a card from the dummy hand, her fingers hovering over a low diamond. Then, a barely perceptible flinch, a micro-correction, as her gaze darted from my face to her own hand. Her fingers shifted and landed on the queen of spades instead. It was a perfectly legal move, the correct move, even. But the hesitation was all wrong. It was the twitch of a magician before the reveal, the tell of a liar who almost forgot their own story.
A small, cold knot formed in my stomach. It was nothing. It was stress. We were all getting older, our movements less certain. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had just seen a crack in the foundation of our little world.
The Subtle Tremor: A Queen Where a Jack Should Be
The first game ended, as it often did, with Eleanor and her partner, Brenda, taking the rubber. Eleanor accepted the win with her usual gracious smile, the one that never quite reached her eyes. She’d had a remarkable run of luck lately, pulling aces from thin air and finessing tricks that seemed mathematically impossible. We’d all chalked it up to the random cruelty of the cards.
“I swear, El, you could fall into a sewer and come out clutching a winning lottery ticket,” Brenda said, shuffling the deck for the next round.
Eleanor just laughed, a light, tinkling sound. “Just playing the cards I’m dealt, darling.”
This time, I was watching. Not just my own hand, not just the board, but her. My job as a rare book restorer has trained my eye for the minuscule, the out of place—a pinprick of foxing on a 17th-century manuscript, a single thread of modern polymer in a medieval binding. I see things people miss. And I was seeing things now.
We were halfway through a complex hand. I was the declarer, and I had been meticulously counting the spades. I knew for a fact that the jack of spades was still out. It was the only card that could trip me up. I played a low card from my hand, leading toward the dummy.
Eleanor, sitting to my left, played last. She paused, tapping a manicured nail against her chin. Then, with that same fluid grace, she laid down the queen of spades. I stared at it. The queen. I had seen the queen played three tricks ago. I was sure of it. Carol had played it.
My mind raced, replaying the last few minutes. Did I misremember? Was my memory, once a steel trap, finally starting to rust? I looked across at Carol, but she was focused on her next move, oblivious. I glanced at Brenda, who was already mentally spending her winnings on a new set of garden gnomes.
No one else saw it. Or if they did, they didn’t care. But I knew. The jack of spades was a ghost, and a resurrected queen was sitting in its place on the table, looking up at me with a smug, papery face. Eleanor met my gaze, her expression a perfect mask of polite inquiry. In that moment, the cold knot in my stomach tightened into a ball of ice. This wasn’t luck. It was a lie.
The Subtle Tremor: The Weight of History
Driving home, the accusation I hadn’t made felt like a stone in my throat. Cheating at bridge. It sounded so petty, so… suburban. Like a plot point in a cozy mystery novel. But this wasn’t fiction. This was Eleanor.
Eleanor, who held my hand at my mother’s funeral and didn’t let go for three hours. Eleanor, who brought over a vat of homemade lasagna the week my son, Alex, had his tonsils out and I was losing my mind. We’d met in a Lamaze class thirty years ago, two terrified young women with ballooning bellies, and had navigated every major life event together since.
She and I were always the competitors of the group. In our twenties, it was about whose baby walked first. In our thirties, whose garden produced the best tomatoes. In our forties, it was a quiet, unspoken rivalry over our children’s college acceptance letters. Bridge was just the latest arena. Our rivalry was a kind of currency, a familiar friction that, in its own way, kept our friendship alive and sharp.
But there was a darkness there, too. Her husband, David, had left her for his dental hygienist a decade ago, a brutal affair that had hollowed her out. She’d rebuilt her life with a fierce, almost terrifying determination, but the betrayal had left a permanent scar. She needed to win, not just at cards, but at everything. It was as if every small victory was a repudiation of that one, catastrophic loss.
To accuse her wasn’t just to accuse a friend of cheating at a game. It was to call into question the very bedrock of our shared lives. It was to risk unraveling a tapestry woven over decades, through births and deaths, marriages and divorces. Brenda’s husband had passed from a sudden heart attack two years ago, and our weekly game was her lifeline, a small island of normalcy in a sea of grief. Carol was still reeling from a messy divorce. Our group was fragile, a delicate ecosystem of dependencies and unspoken needs.
Was a card game worth blowing all that up? Was the integrity of a few hands of bridge worth the potential devastation? I pulled into my driveway, the setting sun glinting off the windshield, and felt a wave of nausea. I had seen what I had seen. But what I was supposed to do about it was a far more complicated question.
The Subtle Tremor: The First Whispers of Paranoia
The smell of garlic and roasting chicken met me at the door. Mark was in the kitchen, a dishtowel slung over his shoulder, humming along to some classic rock station. He was an engineer, a man of logic and straight lines, a comforting anchor in my often-chaotic world.
“Hey, honey. How were the sharks?” he asked, kissing my cheek.
“The usual,” I mumbled, dropping my purse on the counter. “Eleanor won. Again.”
Mark laughed. “Of course she did. The woman’s got the devil’s own luck.”
I hesitated, swirling the condensation on my water glass. “I don’t think it’s luck, Mark.”
He turned from the oven, his brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“I think she’s cheating.” The words sounded insane as soon as they left my mouth. They hung in the warm, garlicky air between us, absurd and ugly.
Mark’s face softened. He wiped his hands on the towel and came over, putting his arms around me. “Sarah. It’s a game. You all get so worked up about it. Maybe you were just tired? You’ve been putting in long hours at the museum.”
“No, I saw her,” I insisted, my voice rising with a frustration that was half-directed at him, half at myself for sounding so unhinged. “She played a card that was already gone. And I saw her palm a card earlier. I’m not imagining it.”
“Okay, okay,” he said, his tone placating, the one he used when I was stressing about a deadline or worrying about Alex’s grades. “But Eleanor? Cheating? Isn’t that a little… dramatic? What would be the point? You’re not playing for money.”
And there it was. The logical, reasonable, male perspective that completely missed the point. It wasn’t about money. It was about everything else. It was about trust and respect and thirty years of friendship.
“You don’t believe me,” I said flatly.
“I believe you *think* you saw something,” he corrected gently. “But you get competitive, hon. You and Eleanor have been at it for years. Maybe you’re just looking for a reason she’s on a winning streak.”
He was trying to be kind, to protect me from my own “paranoia.” But all it did was make me feel completely and utterly alone. I had seen a betrayal, and the first person I told had just patted me on the head and told me I was being emotional. The gaslighting had begun before the confrontation even happened.
The Unraveling Thread: The Calculated Glance
A week later, I walked into Carol’s sunroom with a resolution as hard as a diamond. I would not say a word. I would simply watch. I would gather my evidence like a prosecutor, quietly and methodically, until it was irrefutable.
The air was thick with the usual chatter. Brenda was showing off pictures of her new grandchild, a tiny, wrinkled creature swaddled in blue. Carol was pouring wine, a generous Merlot that she called her “Thursday medicine.” Eleanor was recounting a story about a disastrous run-in with a rude contractor, making everyone laugh. She seemed so normal, so completely at ease. For a moment, I allowed myself to believe Mark was right, that I had imagined the whole thing.
Then we sat down to play, and the mask of normalcy fell away. I watched her shuffle. While Brenda’s shuffle was a clumsy mashing and Carol’s was a gentle cascade, Eleanor’s was a work of art. Her fingers were nimble, the cards weaving together with a practiced flick-flick-flick. And in that fluid motion, I saw it. A fractional pause. A slight pressure of her left thumb on the bottom card as the two halves of the deck came together. It was a classic bottom-deal setup. So subtle, so expert, you’d never see it if you weren’t looking for it.
My heart started to pound a low, steady drumbeat against my ribs. I wasn’t crazy.
Throughout the first two hands, I watched her hands more than I watched my own cards. I saw the way she held her hand, fanned out just so, with the back of her palm angled slightly away from the rest of us. I saw the way her eyes, sharp and intelligent, weren’t just reading the table, but reading us. She was gauging our attention, waiting for the moments when Carol was distracted by a story or Brenda was lost in thought.
The most damning piece of evidence came during a discard. She had a long suit of clubs and needed to get rid of a loser from another suit. As she reached to play her card, her thumb slid almost imperceptibly across the top of her fanned hand, tucking the ace of hearts just behind the king. A moment later, as she squared up her cards, the two had swapped places. It was a move so slick, so economical, it was nearly invisible. But I saw it. I saw everything. And the quiet observation I had planned felt like a pot of water slowly, inexorably coming to a boil.
The Unraveling Thread: The Accusation in a Crowded Room
The third hand was the tipping point. The bidding had been aggressive, landing us in a six-spade contract. It was a knife’s-edge game, every trick critical. I was on Eleanor’s right, and the fate of the game rested on the location of the ace of diamonds. I had the king and queen. Eleanor, as the declarer, had the rest.
She played the hand brilliantly, I had to admit, drawing out trumps and carefully managing her entries. It all came down to the final two tricks. She needed both of them. She led a low diamond from the dummy, a clear attempt to finesse me, hoping I had the ace.
My heart hammered. This was it. I knew from the earlier play that Carol had been void in diamonds for several rounds. Brenda had already shown her last one. If I had the ace, Eleanor would go down. If Eleanor had it, she’d make her grand slam.
I played my king, a hopeful sacrifice. The table held its breath.
Eleanor smiled, a thin, triumphant curve of her lips. And from her hand, she smoothly produced the ace of diamonds.
A collective groan went around the table from my side. Brenda threw her cards down in disgust. “Son of a… well played, El. I thought for sure Sarah had it.”
But my blood had turned to ice. Because I had been counting. I had been tracking every high card like an auditor. And I knew, with the certainty of a mathematical proof, that the ace of diamonds had been in the hand she’d been dealt as the dummy, which was face-up on the table. It had been there, and now it was in her hand.
The rage, hot and sudden, completely overrode my carefully constructed plan of quiet observation. The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.
“No.” My voice was quiet, but it cut through the room like a shard of glass.
Everyone looked at me.
“No,” I said again, louder this time, my eyes locked on Eleanor’s. “That’s impossible. The ace of diamonds was in the dummy.” I pointed a trembling finger at the cards on the table. “I saw it there at the start of the hand.”
The air in the sunroom went still and cold. The cheerful chatter, the clinking of glasses, the whole comfortable fabric of our Thursday afternoon—it all just… stopped.
The Unraveling Thread: The Masterclass in Gaslighting
Eleanor didn’t flinch. She didn’t even blink. She just looked at me, her head tilted with an expression of deep, compassionate concern. It was a masterful performance.
“Sarah, what are you talking about?” she asked, her voice soft and laced with worry. “The ace was in my hand the whole time. You must be mistaken.”
“I’m not mistaken!” My voice was shaking now, a mixture of fury and adrenaline. “I saw it. You swapped it. You’ve been cheating this whole time!”
Carol gasped. Brenda’s jaw dropped so far her half-eaten cookie fell onto her lap.
But Eleanor’s placid, concerned expression never wavered. She turned her gaze from me to the others, a silent appeal for them to witness my complete and total breakdown.
“Honey, are you feeling alright?” she said, her voice dripping with faux sympathy. “You’ve seemed so stressed lately. All that pressure with your work, and isn’t Alex having some trouble in that chemistry class?”
My stomach twisted. She was using the intimate details of my life, the things I had shared with her in confidence, as weapons. She was painting me as a hysterical, overwrought woman cracking under the pressure. She wasn’t just denying the accusation; she was invalidating the accuser.
“Don’t you dare,” I hissed, my hands clenched into fists on the table. “Don’t you turn this on me. I know what I saw.”
“We all make mistakes, Sarah,” she continued, her voice now a soothing balm of condescension. “Maybe you just glanced at the dummy and thought you saw it. It’s an easy mistake to make when you’re tired.” She looked at Carol and Brenda again. “Honestly, I’m worried about her.”
It was brilliant. It was diabolical. In the space of thirty seconds, she had reframed reality. She was no longer the cheater; I was the unstable one. Carol was already looking at me with pity, her peacemaker instincts kicking in. Brenda just looked deeply uncomfortable, staring at her cards as if they held the answers to the universe.
I was trapped. I had no proof, only my word. And my word had just been expertly and systematically dismantled by a master manipulator. I had blundered into her trap, and the door had just slammed shut behind me.
The Unraveling Thread: The Silent Drive Home
The game didn’t so much end as dissolve. Carol, flustered, started gathering the cards with jerky movements, muttering something about the time. Brenda announced she had to go pick up her dry-cleaning, a blatant excuse. No one looked at me. No one looked at Eleanor. The accusation hung in the room like a toxic fog.
Eleanor was the last to speak. She placed a cool hand on my arm as I stood to leave. “Sarah, please,” she said, her voice a low murmur. “If you need to talk, I’m here. We’ve been friends for too long to let a silly misunderstanding come between us.”
The sheer audacity of it left me speechless. She was offering me an olive branch while simultaneously holding the knife she’d just slid between my ribs. I pulled my arm away as if her touch had burned me. I couldn’t even form words. I just grabbed my purse and walked out, the screen door slamming shut behind me.
The ten-minute drive home felt like an eternity. I was vibrating with a rage so pure and so potent it scared me. It wasn’t just about the cheating anymore. It was about the betrayal. It was the calculated, cold-blooded way she had used our friendship, my vulnerabilities, my life, to humiliate and discredit me. She hadn’t just cheated at cards; she had cheated at friendship.
And the worst part? It had worked. I could see the doubt in Carol’s eyes, the desire for it all to just go away. I could see Brenda’s discomfort, her unwillingness to get caught in the crossfire. They wouldn’t side with me. Why would they? Siding with me meant chaos. It meant the end of Thursdays, the end of their comfortable routine. Siding with Eleanor meant preserving the status quo.
I gripped the steering wheel, my knuckles white. She had isolated me. She had made me the problem. Mark’s words echoed in my head: *“Maybe you’re just looking for a reason she’s on a winning streak.”* Was I? Was this whole thing a fabrication of my own competitive psyche?
No. The memory of the ace of diamonds appearing in her hand was as clear as the red taillights in front of me. I knew what I saw. The question was no longer about preserving the fragile bonds of our group. She had already broken them. The question now was about justice. And if I couldn’t get it with words, I would have to find another way.
The Ink of Justice: A Schemer’s Epiphany
The next few days were a blur of simmering fury. I went to work at the museum, my hands steady as I repaired the delicate spine of an 18th-century botany text, but my mind was a maelstrom. Every patient stitch I took, every careful application of wheat paste, felt like a mockery of the chaos raging inside me. How could I restore order to a priceless artifact when my own small world was in such disarray?
I was re-housing a collection of illustrated manuscripts on Friday afternoon, wearing my white cotton gloves and using a tiny brush to whisk away a century of dust. The book I was working on had been a victim of a clumsy forger in the 1920s; someone had tried to add a flourish to an initial, using an ink that was chemically incompatible with the original vellum. Over time, it had bled, creating an ugly, spiderwebbed stain.
But under ultraviolet light, the forgery screamed its presence. The modern ink fluoresced a sickly green, a glaring beacon of deceit against the muted, organic tones of the original work.
I clicked off the UV lamp, my hand frozen in mid-air.
The pen.
The novelty pen Alex had given me for Christmas two years ago. It was a silly gadget, a pen with regular blue ink at one end and an invisible ink marker at the other. The cap had a tiny UV LED light built into it for revealing the secret message. It had been sitting in the junk drawer in my kitchen for months.
An idea, cold and sharp and terrifyingly clear, began to form in my mind. It was a plan born of my profession—a world of hidden marks, careful handling, and revealing truths hidden just beneath the surface. I would not accuse. I would not argue. I would simply illuminate.
The ethical gymnastics my brain performed over the next hour were worthy of an Olympic medal. Was it right to use deception to expose deception? Was I sinking to her level? It felt like a betrayal of my own principles. I was a restorer, a preserver of truth, not a forger.
But then I pictured Eleanor’s face, that mask of pitying concern as she dismantled my sanity in front of our friends. This wasn’t about the game anymore. This was about restoring a different kind of truth. The anger burned away the doubt. She had set the rules of engagement when she decided to lie. I was just going to play by them.
The Ink of Justice: The Unseen Mark
That night, after Mark had gone to bed, I retrieved the spy pen from the junk drawer. I also pulled out a brand-new deck of cards I’d bought on the way home, a high-quality Bicycle deck, still sealed in cellophane. I spread the cards out on the dining room table under the warm glow of the overhead light, my heart thumping a nervous rhythm.
This had to be perfect. The mark had to be invisible to the naked eye but glaringly obvious under the UV light. It also had to be simple, something I could apply quickly and consistently.
I uncapped the invisible ink end of the pen. The felt tip was firm and smelled faintly of chemicals. I decided on a system. One small dot in the top-left corner for the aces. Two dots for the kings. A small dash for the queens. Those were the cards she manipulated most often. It was enough.
My hand, usually so steady with a scalpel or a brush, trembled slightly as I made the first mark on the ace of spades. I held it up to the light. Nothing. I tilted it back and forth. Still nothing. Then, I clicked on the pen’s tiny UV light.
The dot blazed to life, a ghostly, brilliant blue speck against the intricate pattern on the back of the card. It was perfect.
I spent the next hour meticulously marking the twelve honor cards. My initial guilt had been replaced by a grim, focused determination. This felt like my work at the museum. I was preparing an exhibit. The exhibit was Eleanor’s duplicity, and the grand opening was next Thursday.
When I was done, I carefully reassembled the deck, putting the jokers back in place and sliding it back into the box. I even managed to re-stick the clear circular seal on the flap, making it look like it had never been opened. It felt like a forgery in itself, an act of pristine deception. I looked at the box sitting on the table, so innocent and normal. It was a bomb, and I was going to walk it into my best friend’s house and light the fuse.
The Ink of Justice: The Trojan Pen
Walking up Carol’s driveway on Thursday felt like walking to my own execution. The new deck of cards was a cold, heavy weight in my purse. My stomach was a nest of snakes. I had rehearsed the sequence of events a dozen times in my head, but a thousand things could go wrong.
I was the first to arrive. “My old deck was getting sticky,” I announced to Carol, pulling out the new cards and breaking the seal with a flourish of forced nonchalance. “Thought we could use a fresh start.”
Carol beamed. “Oh, lovely! These are crisp.” She ran a thumb over the edge, completely oblivious to the secret they held.
Brenda and Eleanor arrived together a few minutes later. Eleanor’s greeting to me was a study in careful neutrality. Not cold, but not warm either. It was the greeting of someone waiting to see what my next move would be. Little did she know, I had already made it.
We played the first few hands with the kind of strained politeness you find at a family holiday after a major argument. The air was still thick with the ghost of my accusation. I played poorly, my mind entirely on the machinations to come.
As we were getting ready to start the second rubber, I set the trap. I opened my purse, pretending to look for a tissue. “Oh, for crying out loud,” I muttered, knocking the spy pen onto the floor, where it rolled under the table.
“Darn it, my keys fell,” I said, getting on my hands and knees. I clicked on the UV light cap to “see” in the gloom, making sure they all saw the little purple-blue beam. I fumbled around for a moment before retrieving the pen. I placed it, along with my actual keys, on the small side table next to my chair.
Two hands later, as Eleanor was preparing to be the scorekeeper for the next round, I made my move.
“My pen just died,” I said, scribbling a few dry lines on a napkin to prove it. “Eleanor, could I be a dear and borrow yours for a sec?”
Before she could offer her own, I quickly added, “Oh, wait, never mind, I have this one.” I reached over to the side table and picked up the spy pen, uncapping the normal, blue-ink end. I handed it to her. “Here, you can use this to keep score. I’ll just find another one later.”
She took it without a second thought. “Thanks, Sarah.”
The bait was taken. Every number she wrote, every time she adjusted her glasses or touched her face, her fingertips would be dusted with the faintest, invisible traces of the fluorescent ink. The trap was set.
The Ink of Justice: The Baiting of the Trap
The next hour was the longest of my life. I had to play bridge while simultaneously running a high-stakes covert operation. My focus was split, my nerves shot. I made several clumsy mistakes, earning a sharp look from Brenda, my partner.
“Earth to Sarah,” she grumbled after I trumped one of her winning tricks. “Head in the game.”
Eleanor, on the other hand, was playing like a champion. She seemed to have put last week’s unpleasantness behind her, her confidence restored. She was laughing, telling stories, and, as I watched with a hawk’s intensity, she was cheating.
It was subtle. A card “accidentally” dropped on her lap and picked up again. A momentary squaring of her deck that allowed her to shift a key card to a more advantageous position. And each time she touched the cards, I imagined the invisible ink transferring from her fingertips to their backs, tiny, glowing fingerprints of her guilt.
I knew I had to create an opportunity, a moment so tempting she couldn’t resist a flagrant, undeniable act of cheating. The perfect hand arrived near the end of the day. It was a messy, unbalanced deal. I was the declarer in a risky three no-trump contract. Success depended entirely on a three-way finesse involving the queen of hearts.
I played the hand deliberately, setting the stage. I bled the other suits dry, leaving only hearts. I knew from the bidding and early play that the king and jack were split between Brenda and Carol. Eleanor, I was certain, had the ten. The queen was the prize.
I led a low heart from my hand, my heart pounding against my ribs like a trapped bird. The plan was for the play to come around to Eleanor. The correct, and losing, play for her would be to play her ten. But if the queen could somehow magically appear in her hand, she would set my contract and win the game for her team.
I laid my card down. I looked at Eleanor. Her eyes scanned the table, the calculations running behind them. I saw her glance at the scoresheet she’d been keeping with my pen. I saw her tuck a stray strand of hair behind her ear with her inky fingers.
She paused, then played a card with a triumphant snap. It was the queen of hearts.
The Unmasking Light: The Final, Brazen Act
The queen of hearts lay on the green felt of the card table, a monarch holding court over a silent kingdom. It was a bold, impossible move. There was no way she should have had that card. It was a cheat so blatant, so arrogant, it took my breath away. It was as if, after my accusation last week, she was doubling down, daring me to challenge her again.
“Well, I’ll be,” Brenda said, shaking her head in admiration. “I would have sworn Carol had that. Down one, Sarah.”
Carol just shrugged, a little disappointed. “Bad luck, I guess. That was a tough hand.”
Eleanor was already gathering the cards from the trick, a small, knowing smile playing on her lips. She was looking right at me, her eyes glinting with victory. She thought she had won. She thought she had put me, the hysterical, paranoid friend, back in my place. She didn’t just want to win the game; she wanted to win this war of realities, to prove that her version of events was the only one that mattered.
My own hand was shaking, but not from fear or uncertainty. It was the tremor of contained energy, the feeling an electrical wire must have just before a circuit blows. All the planning, all the guilt, all the rage had led to this single moment. This single card. I let the silence hang for a beat, letting her savor her triumph.
Then, I cleared my throat. The sound was unnaturally loud in the quiet room.
“You know,” I began, my voice steady and surprisingly calm, “I think I dropped my earring. It’s the pearl one Mark gave me for our anniversary. I’d hate to lose it.”
About the Author
