Part 1: “Same Time, Every Night”
Detective Hall kept the video paused on the frame where Luca reached into the cabinet beside his workbench. For several seconds, nobody in the room spoke.
Then she pressed play.
Luca took a bottle from the cabinet and carried it toward the house. My first-aid box was tucked under his other arm. The timestamp in the corner read 1:14 a.m., the first night after I scraped my heel.
I watched him vanish from the garage camera’s view.
My hands began to shake again.
“That’s the night you said you cleaned it?” Detective Hall asked.
I nodded.
“He told me he’d disinfected it before bed.”
She rewound the clip and watched it twice more. Then she opened the next recording.
The following night, Luca appeared at almost exactly the same time.
He carried the same first-aid box.
He opened the same cabinet.
He took out the same bottle.
And once again, he walked toward the house.
By the third night, I had stopped watching the screen and started watching Detective Hall.
She no longer looked surprised.
She looked focused.
“Keep going,” she said.
The recordings revealed a pattern I never knew existed.
Every night, after I had gone to bed, Luca entered the garage. He took the bottle from the cabinet, brought it inside, and came back several minutes later. Sometimes he carried the bottle back. Sometimes he left it out of frame.
Then, on the sixth night, something different happened.
Luca stood in the garage doorway and checked his phone before leaving.
Detective Hall froze the video.
“Can you enlarge that?”
The security application let her zoom in just far enough to show the screen in his hand.
It was a message thread.
The words were too small to read, but the contact name at the top was visible.
It wasn’t mine.
Detective Hall photographed the screen.
“We can work with the original recording,” she said.
I stared at the frozen image of my husband.
For six nights, I had believed I was sick because something was wrong with my body.
It had never occurred to me that something might be wrong with the person caring for me.
Dr. Marcus came back before I could ask what would happen next.
He had the laboratory results from the dressing residue.
“The material on the gauze is consistent with a highly caustic alkaline cleaner,” he said. “It can cause severe chemical burns and tissue damage. Combined with an existing wound, repeated exposure could make the injury significantly worse.”
My throat tightened.
“Did he cause the fever?”
Dr. Marcus chose his words carefully.
“Your fever and the condition of your leg suggest a serious infection or inflammatory response. We are treating that aggressively. But the laboratory result gives us a separate concern: repeated chemical exposure to the wound.”
I looked at the dressing in the specimen bag.
The thing Luca had called antiseptic had been damaging me.
And he had been the one applying it.
