On Saturday morning, I purchased the dye and placed the bottle on a shelf inside our pool-storage cabinet. Right beside it sat several other heavy-duty maintenance products. One of those was a highly concentrated shock treatment used to aggressively clear algae—a chemical only meant to be added when the pool was strictly off-limits to swimmers.
The two containers were remarkably similar.
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Same shape
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Same manufacturer
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Different labels
You can probably see exactly where this is going. I, blinded by my own petty revenge, apparently could not.
Chapter 4: The Wrong Bottle
The following afternoon, the house was quiet. Laura had taken Sophie shopping for back-to-school clothes, and Ben had gone with my brother to watch a minor-league baseball game. I was home alone.
At exactly 2:38 PM, the backyard motion alert chimed.
Karen.
She had found yet another way through the locked gate. I would later discover that she had simply taken a hammer and a screwdriver and tapped the removable pin straight out of one of the hinges. But at that moment, all I saw through the window was Karen stepping onto my patio, wearing a blue bathing suit beneath a sheer white cover-up.
She carried her usual arsenal: a towel, a tote bag, and her phone. She looked toward the house, then deliberately looked toward the camera.
Then, she smiled.
That arrogant, entitled smile made me immediately reach into the cabinet for the bottle.
Outside, Karen discarded her cover-up, dropping it carelessly beside one of our lounge chairs, and stepped confidently into the shallow end. She floated back, closing her eyes, acting like she owned the very water she was floating in.