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When Jessie woke up, she found herself zip-tied to the butcher block.

Ryan was curled up in a ball at the base of the breakfast table. He wasn’t tied up. The man must have figured he was no longer a threat. She tried to ascertain the intruder’s location, but it hurt too much to turn her neck. A moment after she realized that, the pain in her forehead, cheek and ribs all joined the party too. Her nose and lower back weren’t much better.

“I was worried you’d miss all the fun,” a male voice said from somewhere behind her.

He stepped into view, and she saw their assailant. He hadn’t put the ski mask that she’d ripped off back on. That wasn’t a good sign. It meant that he didn’t care that she could identify him.

And she definitely could. The man had light brown hair and matching eyes, which were badly bloodshot. He had several days of stubble. Like the survivors had said, he was big—over six feet tall and 200 pounds. Jessie guessed that he was bigger than Ryan.

He was wearing black pants and a black hoodie that looked vaguely familiar. It took her a moment to get why. She recognized the outfit. This was the man who'd loitered drunkenly by their car when they came back from chasing Daniel Forrester. Apparently, he hadn't been drunk at all. He was waiting for them, and had been, she suspected, stalking them.

“So,” she asked, her voice hoarse from the rolling pin to the neck, “did you put the poison in his coffee when we ran off down the street?”

“I did,” he answered calmly. “After spending all evening watching you two stake Forrester out, I was beginning to wonder whether I’d ever get the chance. But your husband there was so excitable when you two went after the guy that he forgot to lock up. That’s a bad habit.”

Ryan suddenly inhaled deeply, like he’d been stabbed. Then he exhaled with what sounded almost like a whinny. She could tell that he was in agony but doing his best to hide it.

“I guess we should get down to business,” the man said. “It sounds like hubby there won’t be with us that much longer.”

Jessie set aside the terror she felt at what was happening to the man she loved. Strangely, if she was going to save him, she had to divorce herself from any empathy for him. It could cloud her judgement.

She looked at the clock on the wall. It was 10:03 p.m. She thought back to when they first returned to the car after following Forrester. She recalled Ryan calling for officers to break up the block party at 9:34. By then, he’d already had at least one gulp of coffee.

That meant that the poison had first entered his system about twenty-nine minutes ago. Based on what the survivors had told them, he probably had around ninety minutes left. She figured that she needed to get the antidote in him well before then to guarantee that he’d recover.

Doing the math in her still-fuzzy brain, she estimated that she had somewhere between a half hour and forty-five minutes to get out of this situation so she could get her husband medical care. And right now, she had no idea how to do that.

“What is this all about?” she asked, trying to stay calm and keep the criticism out of her tone.

The man didn’t answer, instead pulling out a breakfast room chair and settling into it.

“Oh come on,” she said, doing her best to keep her voice even, “it’s too late for the silent treatment. I know that you kept telling the other spouses that they needed to ‘watch the show, to feel it, to understand.’ But you’ve already gone well beyond that with me, what with your explanation about how clever you were earlier. You may as well come clean. Why are you doing this?”

“It’s up to you to understand,” he said, sounding irked by her assumptions.

“But I’m not going to,” she insisted. “Just like the other survivors, the worse off my husband gets, the more panicky I’ll become, begging you to let me get help for him. I’m not going to be engaging in any introspection, so I’m never going to ‘understand.’ Whatever lesson you’re trying to teach me, you need to spell it out more clearly, because I’m not getting it.”

“What makes you think you’re going to survive this?” he asked.

“What?”

"Just a moment ago, you said 'just like the other survivors,'" he noted. "But they never saw my face, so I could afford to let them live. Why would I do that with you when you could ID me, especially when you're a cop?"

“I’m not a cop,” she told him.

“Whatever you are, you signed your own death warrant the moment you pulled off that ski mask.”

Jessie let that sink in. And after she got over the initial panic, another emotion snuck into her system: hope. Maybe she could get him talking after all.

“All the more reason to tell me then,” she said. “If I won’t be around to tell the authorities what you said, you may as well reveal your big secret. Why are you killing people and making their loved ones watch? What happened to you?”

The man put his head in his hands, seeming to sit with that for a few seconds. She took that unobserved moment to look around. Her eyes fell on a decent-sized shard of glass from one of the broken plates. It was close enough to grab. She was about to reach for it when he raised his head again. Looking at his expression, she knew he was going to come clean.

“My wife died,” he said. “She had lung cancer. Never smoked a day in her life, by the way. From the moment we found out until the day she died, it was less than four months. We started dating freshman year of high school. She was my world.”

As Jessie listened to him, she tried to find some of the empathy that she'd deliberately chosen not to give her husband in this moment. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn't have been hard. But this man, widower though he may have been, was killing people.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” she forced herself to say. “I’ve been through a lot of emotional pain in my life, but nothing like that. I can’t imagine how difficult it was for you both.”

“But you see,” he said. “You can imagine, because it’s happening to you right now, just on an accelerated timeline. You get to feel everything I did—the fear, the helplessness, the guilt that you couldn’t do anything to stop it—it’s all here for you right now.”

Now, she understood his motive, at least partly. But she felt like she was missing important pieces of the puzzle. So instead of saying what she wanted to say, which was that he was a sadistic bastard, she tried—as he wanted—to understand.

“When did your wife—what was her name?”

“Kara,” he said mournfully.

“When did Kara pass away?” she asked.

“Five years ago.”

Jessie tried to hide the shock she felt. If his wife had died five years ago, why was he only going on this spree of poisonings now? She framed the question as delicately as she could.

“You managed to deal with the pain of her loss for a long time,” she noted carefully. “What changed?”

The man sighed deeply and stood up, turning away from her and looking out the window. In that moment, Jessie decided that she needed a backup plan that didn’t involve talking down a man who was slowly killing her husband.

So, with her free hand, she grabbed the nearby shard of broken glass plate lying on the floor. It was small enough to hide in her palm but was also—she hoped—thick enough to do what she intended. She turned her body slightly to hide what she was doing, and with her eyes still on the man, began cutting at the zip tie with the piece of glass.

She stopped briefly when he spoke again, waiting to see if he’d turn around. He didn’t.

“I went to my little brother’s wedding this weekend,” he explained. “It was on Saturday. They held it at a lovely resort in the mountains just outside Boulder, Colorado. I was, at his insistence, his best man. I had to stand next to him as he exchanged vows. I had to give a toast at the reception. I had to fake being happy for them.”

He started to turn around. Jessie stopped cutting at the zip tie.

“I’m really sorry,” she said quietly.

“And they didn’t make it easy for me,” he continued, walking back over and sitting down again. “They made no accommodation for my situation. My brother never asked if I was comfortable playing such a big role in everything. His new wife even pointed out one of the bridesmaids and said I should ‘hit that,’ as if I was that kind of guy. She seemed to think she was being supportive and helpful, but the callousness was hard to bear. They just didn’t seem to care, or even notice, that I was still in pain. They didn’t feel what I felt. They didn’t understand. And when I realized that, something inside me snapped.”

He put his head in his hands again. Jessie used the opportunity to cut into the zip tie a little more. She felt it give slightly and allowed herself a quick glance. The thing was sliced halfway, still not enough to break free.

“What did you do?” she asked, more to prevent silence than because she was curious. She already knew the answer to that question.

“I wanted to kill both of them that night,” he said. “But of course, I didn’t. I went back to my room and stewed. It ate at me all night and the next morning at the goodbye brunch, where they were all over each other. And then, on the flight back here that day, I had a moment of perfect clarity.”

He looked up at her.

“What?” she asked.

"I work as a clinical scientist for a major pharma company," he told her. "Late last year we ended a drug trial early because we discovered that when the medication was combined with a specific compound found in certain foods and drinks, the interaction caused a milder version of what your husband is experiencing now. It wasn't deadly, but it was poisonous enough to cause illness. It was simply too dangerous to pursue. But I still had all the research. So when I got home, I went into the lab and intentionally combined the medication with the compound in a concentrated liquid. And then, that night, I went to dinner. That's where I saw James and Sarah Whitaker."

“And that’s where you poisoned him?” she asked, trying not to dwell on how close they’d been to the answer when pursuing Eric Sawyer. They’d had the right general profession, just the wrong person.

The man nodded.

"They were flaunting themselves," he said defensively. "So when he went to the bathroom and she started checking her phone, I walked by their table. I pretended to trip and bumped into it. As I steadied myself, I used a dropper to inject the liquid into his drink. She didn't even notice. It was even easier the next afternoon at the movie theater in the dark. Those folks were being unbelievably handsy."

“What does that mean?” Jessie asked. “Like they were going at it right there in the theater?”

“No,” he said, looking at her with complete sincerity. “They were holding hands.”