The pain medication they pumped through my IV finally took the sharpest edge off the agony, leaving behind a dull, thrumming ache that pulsed with my heartbeat. My entire upper left quadrant felt wrapped in hot lead.
Around midnight, a detective named Ramos entered the cubicle. He pulled up a plastic chair, notebook in hand, his face etched with the grim fatigue of a man who spent his nights looking at domestic horrors.
“Ms. Vance,” Ramos said quietly. “The kitchen staff handed over the glass Kendall threw. Or rather, the busboy found it hidden behind the linen bin in the bridal suite. Someone tried to rinse it, but our forensics team pulled chemical traces from the rim and the base.”
“What was it?” I asked, though in my gut, I already knew.
“Concentrated sodium hydroxide,” Ramos answered bluntly. “Fifty percent industrial solution. Commonly used in metal degreasing, chemical peeling, and heavy manufacturing. It has no smell, no color, and the viscosity of a light syrup. In high concentrations, it doesn’t just burn; it saponifies human fat tissue.”
I closed my good eye, feeling a tear trace down the right side of my face. Saponification. The exact term Dad had written on the whiteboard in our garage when Kendall and I were children. Dad had been a senior formulation chemist for Apex Petrochemical before his mysterious death eight years ago. He had spent his entire career drilling safety protocols into our heads.
*If anyone knows what lye does, it’s Mom and Kendall,* I thought. *They lived in that house. They saw Dad’s warning labels.*
“Detective,” I said, my voice shaking. “My sister didn’t just grab a glass off the tray by mistake. She looked directly at me. She smiled for the cameras. She told me it was a joke.”
“Your mother claims Kendall was handed the glass by an unknown catering assistant who claimed it was a celebratory shot,” Ramos noted, reading from his notepad. “She claims your sister is devastated, hysterical with grief, and currently sedated at home.”
“That’s a lie,” Tyler spoke up from the corner of the room. He stepped into the light, his jaw set. “Kendall wasn’t hysterical. When the ambulance pulled away, she was laughing in the parking lot with her new husband, checking her Instagram comments to see if anyone had posted clips of the toast.”
Ramos looked between us, his pencil hovering. “If we’re going to treat this as an aggravated assault or attempted maiming, I need to know motive. Why would your sister want to disfigure you?”
I looked at the white hospital ceiling. Memories from the last two months flashed through my mind: Mom insisting that I sign away my share of Dad’s remaining estate before the wedding; Kendall demanding that I hand over Dad’s encrypted research hard drives so she could sell them to an overseas beauty brand looking for his patented skin-peeling formulas.
“Dad didn’t die of a heart attack eight years ago,” I said softly, the realization finally solidifying in the dark recesses of my mind. “And whatever is in that storage unit… Mom and Kendall are terrified I’m going to find it.”
