Page 47 of Potion Sickness

“He’s the same. Sleeping. Annabel checks on him twice a day.”

“Mm.” She folds the foil. “And does she… I mean, does anyone know anything yet? About what it was?”

“She’s working on it.”

“Because people are saying it was the curse, and other people are saying it was his heart, and Dorcas is telling everyone it was probably an allergy. Which, if I were Dorcas, I’d be careful about, since she was the one giving everyone pastries…” She pauses. “But what does Annabel actually think it was?”

It’s the third time she’s asked me the same question in three different ways.

“Annabel inspected all the goblets,” I say. “All of them. Everything that was on the banquet table.”

“I thought Dana washed those,” she says. “She was stressing about ruining evidence.”

“She did, but it doesn’t matter. Washing fades a potion residue, but doesn’t erase it. Annabel can pick up a cup and tell you everything that’s ever been in it. Or at least she can try.” I watch her in the mirror. “She couldn’t figure out what was in Damien’s goblet. Something was in Pru’s, though, and she knows exactly what it was.”

Tiffany drops a clip, then picks it up and sets it back on the cart, squaring it with the edge of the tray.

“Well,” she says. “Good. That’s good. Then you’ll catch whoever it was.” She checks the clock. “You need to process. Thirty-five minutes. There’s magazines.”

She puts me under the dryer, and while I sit under the hood with an eight-month-old issue of People, she sweeps the floor, which doesn’t look like it needs sweeping, and then rearranges a shelf of product that was already perfectly arranged.

Next comes the wash, and then the chair again. She takes up a round brush and gets exactly one pass through before her hand stops moving.

“Was whatever was in Pru’s cup—” she says. “Was it also in Damien? Can Annabel tell?”

I turn the chair so I’m looking at her instead of her reflection, but I don’t say anything. She holds out for about four more seconds.

“I bought it online,” she says. “The thing in Pru’s cup. It was just a croak tonic. I ordered it from a website — Glamoury Dot Net, it’s a whole thing. The tonic had a ton of reviews, everyone said it was safe. People use them for auditions and custody hearings and whatever else, I don’t know. It was eleven ninety-nine plus shipping and it came in a padded envelope, a little brown bottle. I swear it’s not dangerous. It’s just like, a voice thing, it makes you hoarse for a little while, that’s all it does, that’s all it’s for⁠—”

“Tiffany.”

“I put it in her cup when I went over for a muffin. My hands are fast, you know, and the whole idea was that she’d croak through her big scene and then I’d get to go on in her place, that was the whole plan, just a sore throat, it’s basically a spa treatment in reverse⁠—”

“Tiffany.”

“—and then an hour later Damien was on the floor.” Her voice cracks. “I’ve keep thinking I put a man in a coma with a twelve-dollar throat potion. I haven’t slept. I’ve washed my hands so many times my cuticles look like Bert’s. I’ve been trying to do the math on how long you go to prison for that. It’s probably a lot of years. I looked it up on my phone at the pub so it wouldn’t be in my search history at home.”

“I don’t think that’s how search history works.”

“I realize that now.”

“Breathe, Tiffany.”

“Is it the same thing?” she says. “Did I do this to him?”

“No,” I say. “It’s not in him. Annabel is certain. She read Damien’s breath the night he collapsed and she’s read him every day since. There’s no sign of croak tonic. Whatever took him out has a completely different signature, and your bottle had nothing to do with any of it. He never drank from Pru’s cup. Neither did she.”

Tiffany sits down, puts both hands over her face, and cries. It goes on for a while, loud and ugly and entirely un-performative, which for Tiffany may be a first. I get up, cape and all, and bring her a box of tissues from beside the register.

“I dosed my own understudy assignment,” she says eventually, into the tissue. “With a tonic from a website that came up on Google. How stupid am I?”

“Why buy it at all?” I ask. “You’re a witch, Tiffany. You come from generations of witches. Why is there a website involved? Why not brew it yourself?”

“Brew?” she laughs. “I can’t brew. Nobody in my family has ever brewed anything stronger than coffee, and half the time the coffee is bad. Illusion is our thing. Grandma could make a bad perm look like a Vogue ad. You think this face is all moisturizer?”

For a second, the light catches her wrong, or maybe it really is an illusion and it falters slightly, and all the sudden there are lines at her mouth and a tiredness under her eyes that I’ve never seen on her face, then the light or whatever it is rights itself and her face is her face again, perfectly smooth and finished.

“Half the women in this town walk out of here with a little more than a blowout,” she says. “Nobody’s ever complained. But a potion? An actual potion, in an actual bottle, that does an actual thing to an actual body? I wouldn’t know where to start.”