Page 40 of For Your Own Good

An idea that started as something so innocent had spiraled so far out of control that someone had died.

He was an awful man. Someone who focused on petty disagreements with his fellow educators. Someone who wanted to punish them for being so annoying. Someone who poisoned their coffee.

Well, maybe not poisoned.Fiddledwith. Hefiddledwith their coffee. Lightly fiddled.

What he should’ve been doing was concentrating on his students. That was his job, his purpose, hismission.

He had screwed it all up.

The feeling inside him had started slowly. A tingle, like a mosquito was crawling around. No, a worm. Definitely a worm.

One that replicated.

The longer he stayed in bed, the more worms there were. It felt awful, as if his insides had been replaced with those slimy, slithering creatures. By Saturday evening, he was consumed with them.

The feeling was not new.

Teddy had felt it once before, after Allison left. When she’d left that bill on the table.

The feeling was so much worse than regret, which was just a nagging thought in the brain. Remorse was having your insides replaced by worms.

None of this would’ve happened if she were still here. She had a way of making everything better.

Whenever he was in a particularly bad mood, they would watch a movie together. She always picked the stupidest comedies. Allison hated dramas, hated anything serious or depressing. At first, he thought her movies were silly and not worth his time.

“It’s worth it if you laugh,” she said. “Even once.”

She was right. Those stupid movies did make him laugh, sometimes more than once, because he was with her. Allison had the most infectious laugh—it was a beautiful sound. One time, he told her it was like listening to poetry. She laughed at that, too.

Now he doesn’t watch those movies. Not without her.

He barely laughs at all, and that’s what started all of this: when hestopped laughing and started noticing how irritating his coworkers really were. He started fiddling with their coffee because they annoyed him to no end.

Thinking about that, and about Allison, made him feel even worse.

HE STAYED INbed until the worms tired out, fell dormant. The pain began to subside as they wore themselves out. On Sunday morning, he finally crawled out of his hole, his sense of purpose renewed. He had to get back to his students, had to keep trying to teach them not to be selfish, entitled little bastards.

First, though, he had to get rid of all his wrongdoing, starting with the basement. Teddy got rid of all the pods, the test tubes, all of his experiments. The pills, the research, everything. It was all just a terrible distraction from what was really important.

Next, he had to tackle the garden, starting with theActaea pachypoda.

The plant had immediately caught his attention. It was impossible to miss those berries—white with a black dot. That’s why it was also called doll’s-eyes. Those little berries looked just like tiny eyeballs, and they were filled with toxins that lower blood pressure. Too much would cause a heart attack. Just a little could make someone lose consciousness.

All he’d wanted to do was make Sonia pass out, preferably in the middle of her ceremony. He had been very careful not to extract too much juice from the berry when he injected it into the coffee pod. Death wasn’t the goal. Not for anyone.

Wearing gloves, he pulled that plant first and wrapped it up tight. Then he moved on to all the others. It didn’t matter if they were poisonous or not—they all had to go. It took two days of atrocious, grueling work. Returning to school wasn’t an option, not until the yard had been cleared.

Then he had to dispose of everything. That was the difficult part. As much as he wanted to pay someone to haul it away, he couldn’t let anyone know what he was doing. No choice but to bag it all up and drive it to ayard-waste disposal facility himself. It took five trips, all to different facilities in different towns. He gave all of them a fake name.

Now, standing on his porch on Tuesday night, his body is sore from all the manual labor. Yet inside, he feels great, like he’s been given a new start. No, he’s givenhimselfa new start.

A fresh glass of milk ends the day. It signals the end of penance.

He has cleansed himself of all the bad things he did, all the ways he was distracted from his true mission: the students.

He’s ready to start over. Again.

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