Page 73 of Potion Sickness

“And the other half of you?” Annabel asks.

“I don’t know. I was skeptical, but figured I’d try it. I checked the reviews,” she says. “There were, like, four hundred reviews. Women writing paragraphs about their husbands suddenly treating them so much better than they were before. People talking about how they managed to win over crushes they’ve been pursuing for years.”

“You were doing this every morning?” I ask.

“Yeah. Since we got here, I’d dose them in the car because his mom is always in the kitchen.”

“Why, though? What made you think you needed a heart philter when you were already together?”

“I don’t know. I was afraid. He was hesitant about moving in together, and I feel like he just thinks of me as… a little kid, I guess. I got afraid he’d leave me for someone more grown up. More worldly. I mean, you’ve seen the way he looks at Pru.”

“I have.”

“He does it in front of me. He tells all these stories, acts like it’s charming. Everyone thinks it’s charming. And everybody has known her since she was born and I’m some new girl, some dumb young thing.”

“To be fair, I don’t think anyone thinks it’s charming,” I say.

Englebert hasn’t moved.

Annabel has her hands folded in her lap. “Tell me about what happened at that rehearsal. The night that he fell, I mean,” she says.

“That week was bad,” Skye says, picking at a thread on the ottoman. “The article came out and everybody looked at him different, and even though it was like, a bad thing, he loved it. He was glad to finally be in the news again. And he kept doting on Pru. And I just kept getting stuck in my head and I did the math on my life and like. I’m twenty-four, I’m living with him in his mother’s house, I don’t have a job here, everyone I know is so far away, and… I don’t know. He’s all I have going for me.”

“So you increased the dose?” I say.

“I stopped counting.” She says it plainly. “Only for a day or two. I just tipped it in. I don’t know how much. Not too much.” She looks at Annabel. “And then he collapsed and I knew it was my fault. That’s why I kept asking you so many questions. I needed to know if I’d broken him permanently.”

“You didn’t,” Annabel says. “Don’t worry about that.”

“I wasn’t asking because I was worried I’d get caught. I’ve wanted to get caught, almost. I’ve been sitting up there telling him what I did. I tell him every night. I keep telling him I’m going to fix it.”

“Skye,” Annabel says. “It isn’t your fault. Not completely. A secret heart philter is a bad thing to do to a person, but it also wouldn’t do this much damage. Not on its own. Not matter how much you pour in.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was taking other things. Other potions.”

“His vitamins,” Skye says.

“Do you know what they were?”

“I know they weren’t vitamins. I mean, he calls them vitamins and I let him but I know he’s lying about it. He takes an anti-aging one, for sure, and a skin one, and there’s another one at night that he takes in the bathroom with the door shut. I think it’s a hair thing. There’s probably others. I don’t know.”

“Where are they?” I ask. “Do you have the bottles?”

“I have them boxed up in my closet. I took every bottle in the house. Everything I could find, at least.” She’s halfway to the stairs. “Because… because I thought if anyone tested anything they’d find mine, so I grabbed all of it⁠—”

“I understand,” Annabel says. “It’s okay.”

“You can fix him? If you have all the bottles, I mean?”

“It means I can start. I can’t purge what I can’t name, though. Go get bottles.”

* * *

Skyre empties what she’s collected out onto the coffee table —eleven bottles, a drugstore pill organizer with actual vitamins inside, a few eye droppers, and a padded envelope with a return address in Nevada. Annabel goes through them one at a time, sorting them. There’s one row of the ones she identifies as being from Glamoury, one row for the others.

“That’s a voice tonic. That’s the skin one, and it’s not Glamoury. That’s home-brewed, from somebody’s kitchen. That’s — oh, wow, Damien.” She holds a squat square bottle up to the window. “This is a youth tonic and it’s a good one. Expensive. He found someone good for this one. How long has he been on this one?”