PART 2
They started the antidote right there in the ER. Vitamin K through an IV, and plasma to help my blood clot again.
The neurologist said the bleed was small. If I’d gone home to “sleep it off,” it would have kept growing all night.
“Your husband would have found you in the morning,” she said. “And everyone would have believed it was the alcohol.”
That was exactly the point.
Odessa called hospital security and the police before I was even out of the CT scanner. She told me later she’d seen the look on Glenn’s face when I held up my phone.
“Thirty years in triage,” she said. “Drunk people don’t get scared of a breathalyzer. Guilty people do.”
The detective came to my room the next morning. My speech was slowly coming back. I told him what I could. The sparkling cider. Glenn pouring it every night. The bruises. The bleeding gums.
The police searched our house that afternoon.
In the garage, behind the paint cans, they found a box of rat poison. Half empty.
We’ve never had rats.
The empty cider bottles in our recycling bin tested positive.
Then the detective found Glenn’s laptop.
The Facebook posts were only the beginning. He’d been sending messages to my sister. To my principal colleagues. To our pastor. All the same story. “She’s drinking again. I’m scared she’ll hurt herself.”
He was writing the ending before it happened.
And there were other messages too. To a woman named Annalise in Cincinnati.
“Be patient, babe. Once the house is mine, we start over. Nobody will ask questions about an alcoholic.”
The house was my parents’ house. They left it to me when they died. It was paid off.
Glenn was arrested in the hospital parking lot. He’d been sitting in his car for six hours, waiting to see if I would make it.
He was charged with attempted murder and felony poisoning.
The detective told me Glenn’s first question in the interview room wasn’t about me.
It was: “How did she have a breathalyzer?”
He pleaded guilty in the spring. Twenty years.
The judge read my statement out loud in court, because my speech still wasn’t perfect.
It said: “He tried to use my past to bury me. He forgot I’ve spent six years proving who I am. Every morning. On the record.”
I went through three months of speech therapy. I went back to my school in March. My students made a banner for the front hallway that said “WELCOME BACK, DR. VOS.”
On Tuesday, I went to my meeting and picked up my seven-year coin.
Odessa came with me. She sat in the back row.
When they called my name, she stood up and clapped louder than anyone in the room.
THE END.
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Some people will tell your story for you before you can tell it yourself. Keep your receipts. Keep your truth. And keep people around who will check.
Would yo