She stood at the bathroom sink, wet tile ringed with plastic bottles and potions and leaking creams and serums I was always begging her to throw out. The light must’ve been buzzing, because the bulb has to be replaced by a specialist, and we’ve been saying we’d ring him every day for five years now.

The air stank of deodorant.

Later she would claim she was purging the small white room from a bee that had crept in through the window she had opened to let the damp out. We had a patch of mould grow on the ceiling last month. She blamed me for taking too-hot showers.

She had turned the minute she sensed me, eyes circled in day old mascara and the rouging of tears. Her voice was not broken enough for it to have been sorrow. I had noticed it before I had even reached her upstairs, the kitchen light shut off and overflowing with dirty glasses all smelling stained with the same medicinal tang. The empty cat bowl, the way Pepper yowled, and the unmistakable stench of burning tar seeping through the walls.

A ball of foil lay in the sink, but her arms were spotted with those tiny red needle-bites that told me there were implements much worse to be found elsewhere.

Her face said: You’re supposed to be in London.

“Meeting got cancelled,” I said. “Lara.”

Lara did not look at me then.

Instead she reached into the sink and crushed the ball of foil into her fist.

"The train strike," she said.

"What?"

"The train strike. I thought you said there was a train strike."

I stared at her. "There isn't."

"Right."

The foil crackled in her hand.

For a moment neither of us moved. The extractor fan rattled overhead, making its usual dying-animal noise. Somewhere downstairs Pepper knocked something over and began meowing as though he had been abandoned for years rather than an afternoon.

"Lara."

She flinched.

"What is this?"

"What is what?" She asked.

"The foil."

She looked at her fist as if she had forgotten it was there.

"Oh."

"Don't."

"I'm not doing anything."

"Don't do that thing where you pretend not to know what I'm talking about."

Her jaw tightened.

The room felt suddenly tiny. The deodorant hung in the air so thick it stung the back of my throat.

I looked at her.

She looked away first.

Finally I said, "How long?"

"What?"

"How long, Lara?"

I had prepared myself for shouting, for some spectacular performance. Instead she just looked tired.

"I don't know."

"Try."

"A few months."

I nodded once. "A few months."

"Yes."

"The new credit card is a few months old."

She said nothing.

"The necklace your grandmother left you disappeared a few months ago."

"Kari—"

"The cash from the kitchen drawer."

"Kari."

"The laptop."

"Stop."

The word cracked out of her.

Outside, rain tapped lightly against the window.

Lara pressed her palms against the edge of the sink and lowered her head.

"I was going to tell you."

I almost laughed again, because that must have been the oldest sentence in the world. People always planned to tell the truth tomorrow.

"I was going to tell you," she repeated.

"When?"

She didn't answer.

"When I found you unconscious?"

Her eyes snapped up. "Has that happened?"

"No."

"Then don't say things like that."

I stared at her. The absurdity of it almost took my breath away, as though there was a proper way to discover your wife had been poisoning herself in secret.

"Kari," she said quietly.

I hated how frightened she sounded.

"Where is it?" I asked.

"What?"

"The rest of it."

Her gaze drifted toward the door. The cold feeling that had been gathering in my stomach hardened into certainty.

There was more.

Much more.

Lara swayed over the sink, her head bowed in shame. I watched her dark, unkempt hair dip into the porcelain bowl, still wet from the running water that I later found out she used to cover up the sounds of her shaky hands rattling the needles against the sink.

"Lara. Where." I felt like the head teacher scolding a naughty child caught skiving class. I had to fortify myself so that I didn't give in to her bleak face that made me want to pull her close and forget anything ever happened. Because if I succumbed to it and pretended this situation away, well, I knew how it would end for Lara.

She shook her head dismally, and my chest constricted with suppressed agony as the tears began freefalling from her eyes, those eyes, that had so long ago lost the light of life. That uniquely thoughtful stare she used to give me late at night, reflected by the dim streetlight outside the small shitty window of our hostel back when we were young and broke but free. Gone.

"I don't remember. I don't. I swear." Her mouth barely moved, and her tongue darted out to taste the tears that settled on her lower lip. I was suddenly aware of the thunderous beating of my heart, sustaining my body by pumping blood now and forever. I wondered if Lara's heart was struggling to keep up with whatever she had injected into her veins. If she could hear her own blood gushing as keenly as I could now.

I whipped around, leaving the bathroom to begin the search. I had to find her stash and get rid of it as soon as possible. No questions about that. My head began to spin once I left her behind me, visions of her dejected body leaning into the sink for support and the pinpricks of red that dotted her arms like chickenpox blazing through my mind and leaving imprints.

"No, Kari, please!" I couldn't face her again. Not after this. I heard Lara stumble out into the bedroom, mumbling to herself as she bumped into something. I imagined her fingers stained with her lies reaching out for me, and I almost turned to take her in my arms and let her frail body sink into my embrace. But I didn't.

Instead, I began tearing apart the house.

I mourned the person I was before today, and who I was going to become.

Lara lit another joint and stared out at the city from her shithole apartment. It had been six months, maybe nine, since the divorce and she was feeling like burning herself up from the inside. Or the outside, she thought, but drinking was quicker and less painful than self-immolation, and so it was what she went with.

She fumbled for a second with the cabinet doors, the shelf where her cheap whiskey sat being an inch too high for her to reach alone. Her fingers grazed glass and pulled—a second misjudged, and the bottle fell to the floor with a wet crash. Whiskey gushed from the bloom of broken glass and pooled in the grout at her feet. Her hands flew up instinctively at the sound, cradling her head and covering her ears, yelping like some big baby, a scared dog, a screaming child. Her socks soaked rapidly as she swayed with her arms over her face, trying to rock some sense back in to her brain before she had to face the mess before her.

She found she came up empty, with her eyes shut tight and the distant wailing of a car alarm some streets down, all her mind could scream was ‘no’, and all it could materialize was Kari’s face, twisted and bitter as she pulled apart the house like she was a criminal. She ran a hand over her arm for comfort and found only that the feeling of pockmarks and needle pricks made it worse.

Lara Devins was crying, and nothing would stop her until she had burned her throat raw.