“It’s safer this way,” she would say with a reassuring smile that now felt different in his memory.
Gregory searched the boy’s face for any sign of dishonesty or manipulation, but there was nothing there except quiet certainty. “How would you even know something like that?” Gregory asked, his voice tight.
“I clean windows near your house,” the boy replied simply, “and people like you never look down, but I do, and I saw her more than once.”
Gregory felt a chill as the boy continued speaking.
“She wears a silver pendant around her neck, and she opens it sometimes,” he said, “and there’s white powder inside that she mixes into the soup.”
Gregory’s blood seemed to freeze in his veins.
The pendant.
Amanda never took it off, and she always brushed off questions about it with casual answers that now felt suspicious.
Then suddenly a voice called out behind him.
“Gregory?”
He turned immediately.
Amanda stood a few steps away, perfectly composed as always, her appearance elegant and controlled, but her smile faltered the moment she noticed the boy. Something shifted in her expression in a way Gregory had never seen before.
For a brief second, her face revealed something raw and unmistakable.
Fear.