Had Alice Neilson known that the dead had begun to walk the earth, she would have never poisoned Frank’s coffee three mornings earlier. She would have never emptied the tiny glass dropper into the cooling pot while Frank contentedly watched the news, craning his neck and leaning back in his seat to see the television in the next room from his perch at the kitchen table. The way he did every morning, quietly eating his whole wheat toast with butter and strawberry jam as Alice stood at the sink, watched the crawl of morning traffic on the street below their unit, and said nothing.
