Detective Hall kept the video paused on the frame where Luca reached into the cabinet beside his workbench. For several seconds, nobody in the room spoke.
Then she pressed play.
Luca took a bottle from the cabinet and carried it toward the house. He had my first-aid box tucked under his other arm. The timestamp in the corner showed 1:14 a.m., the first night after I scraped my heel.
I watched him disappear from the garage camera’s view.
My hands began to shake again.
“That’s the night you said you cleaned it?” Detective Hall asked.
I nodded.
“He told me he’d disinfected it before bed.”
She rewound the clip and watched it twice more. Then she opened the next recording.
The following night, Luca appeared at almost exactly the same time.
He carried the same first-aid box.
He opened the same cabinet.
He took out the same bottle.
And once again, he walked toward the house.
By the third night, I stopped looking at the screen and started looking at Detective Hall.
She didn’t look surprised anymore.
She looked focused.
“Keep going,” she said.
The recordings showed a pattern that I had never known existed.
Every night, after I had gone to bed, Luca entered the garage. He took the bottle from the cabinet, brought it inside, and returned several minutes later. Sometimes he carried the bottle back. Sometimes he left it out of frame.
Then, on the sixth night, something different happened.
Luca stood in the garage doorway and checked his phone before leaving.
Detective Hall froze the video.
“Can you enlarge that?”
The security application let her zoom in just enough to show the screen in his hand.
It was a message thread.
The words were too small to read clearly, but the contact name at the top was visible.
It wasn’t mine.
Detective Hall took a photograph of the screen.
“We can work with the original recording,” she said.
I stared at the paused image of my husband.
For six nights, I had believed I was sick because something was wrong with my body.
I had not considered that something might be wrong with the person caring for me.
Dr. Marcus returned before I could ask what would happen next.
He had the laboratory results from the dressing residue.
“The material on the gauze is consistent with a highly caustic alkaline cleaner,” he said. “It can cause severe chemical burns and tissue damage. Combined with an existing wound, repeated exposure could make the injury significantly worse.”
My throat tightened.
“Did he cause the fever?”
Dr. Marcus chose his words carefully.
“Your fever and the condition of your leg suggest a serious infection or inflammatory response. We are treating that aggressively. But the laboratory result gives us a separate concern: repeated chemical exposure to the wound.”
I looked at the dressing in the specimen bag.
The thing Luca had called antiseptic had been damaging me.
And he had been the person applying it.
A nurse adjusted my IV while another physician came in to examine the discoloration around my ankle. They marked the edges of the affected area so they could monitor whether the damage was spreading.
For the first time in a week, people were watching my condition instead of asking me to wait until tomorrow.
Detective Hall stepped into the hallway to speak with the officers downstairs.
A few minutes later, she came back.
“Luca is still demanding to see you,” she said.
My stomach dropped.
“What is he saying?”
“That you’re confused because of the fever. That he was taking care of you. That you left without telling him and he was worried.”
I almost laughed.
Not because anything was funny.
Because I had spent seven days listening to exactly that version of my own reality.
I was confused.
I was overreacting.
I was making the wound worse by touching it.
I needed to wait.
I looked down at my swollen ankle.
“Can he come here?”
“No.”
The answer was immediate.
Detective Hall showed me another photograph from the security recording.
“Before we do anything else, I want you to tell me whether this cabinet is normally locked.”
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