My mother was in my recliner. Reading glasses on. Feet up. She had a blanket over her knees, the crocheted one she made in 2014. She looked comfortable. She looked like a nice old woman watching television.

She looked up at me and smiled.

“Soup good, baby?”

I didn’t confront her that night. I couldn’t. I went to bed and lay in the dark for six hours. The ceiling fan was on. It made that clicking sound it always makes. I stared at it and tried to understand what was happening.

The next morning I went to Dr. Parekh’s office. She showed me the report. She explained the compound. She explained the dosage patterns. She explained what ten years of chronic low-dose thallium exposure does to a human body. Every symptom I’d had, every one, was consistent.

She asked me who prepared my food.

I told her.

She picked up the phone and called the police.

They arrested my mother at her house in Red Bank on a Friday morning. She was watering her azaleas. The officer told me later that she put down the watering can very calmly, took off her garden gloves, folded them, set them on the porch rail, and held out her wrists.

She didn’t look surprised.

My brother Trevor drove down from Nashville. He didn’t believe it at first. “Not Mama,” he said. “There’s a mistake.” There wasn’t a mistake.

They found the thallium in her pantry. Behind the baking supplies. In a Ziploc bag labeled “garden treatment.”

I went to see her before the arraignment. I don’t know why. I sat across from her in a room with a table and two chairs and a guard by the door.

“Why?”

She looked at me the way she’d looked at me across my kitchen table a thousand times. Calm. Patient. Like I was being dramatic.