Every single morning, my husband made me drink his special homemade vitamin C juice.
He called it love.
I called it punishment in a glass.
“It strengthens your immune system,” Wesley Arden would say, setting the cloudy orange liquid beside my breakfast plate. “You’re always tired, Mara. You need to take better care of yourself.”
The juice was sour enough to make my eyes water. It tasted metallic sometimes, bitter other times, with a chalky film that clung to my tongue. When I complained, Wesley smiled the way he smiled at nervous clients in his accounting firm—patient, polished, and faintly cruel.
“Don’t be dramatic,” he said. “It’s just vitamins.”
For twelve years, I had been married to a man who corrected my posture, my spending, my friends, even the way I breathed when I was anxious. To everyone else, he was devoted. To me, he was a locked room with good manners.
The juice began after I told him I wanted to go back to work.
I had been a financial analyst before our daughter, Lily, was born. Now Lily was ten, and I wanted something that belonged to me again. Wesley said he supported me. Then he began hovering. Asking where I went. Checking my phone. Making me breakfast. Insisting on the juice.
After three days of choking it down, I started pouring it into a travel bottle and taking it with me. I planned to dump it at the office building where I volunteered part-time.
But Wesley’s secretary, Allison Pryce, saw me grimace one morning near the reception desk.
“What is that?” she asked.
“Vitamin C juice from my husband.”
She laughed. “I’ll take it. I love sour stuff.”
I should have said no.
Instead, tired of being controlled even by a glass of liquid, I handed it to her.
The next day, she asked for it again. “Honestly, it wakes me up.”
For a week, I gave Allison my daily portion.
On the seventh day, Wesley’s office called me at 9:18 a.m.
Allison had collapsed beside the copy machine.
By the time I reached St. Vincent’s Hospital, she was awake but gray-faced, with an IV in her arm and fear in her eyes.
A doctor asked me if I knew what Allison had consumed that morning.
Before I could answer, Wesley arrived.
He froze when he saw the travel bottle on the counter beside her bed.
Allison pointed at it weakly.
“That juice,” she whispered. “Mara gave me Wesley’s juice.”
