“Well, I’ve thought of laudanum. I’m just sick of everything, Liv. Just really sick of it. I figure I can stand it, oh, I don’t know, a few more years, I guess…”

Danae’s voice trailed off into a whisper. Bretton was asleep (Livia could hear snores—she was certain they were his), and his sister, come down for the holiday from Connecticut with her husband and their two precocious children, was also asleep. No one could hear, but Danae spoke as though someone might be listening.

“Laudanum?”

She remembered laughing at first, not because she saw anything funny in what Danae was saying, but as a sort of nervous reaction, a facile replacement for saying something, because she had no idea of what to say, and her sister couldn’t possibly be serious anyway. Danae was a maudlin drunk.

But the laughing stopped as Danae’s level of investment in the whole thing became increasingly evident. At first Danae hadn’t been sure where she would get laudanum, she told Livia in her hurried, breathy voice, because people didn’t really use laudanum anymore for suicides, but she had found some. Danae, as she informed Livia in absolute, hiccupping confidence, had read about laudanum.

Laudanum was clean, bloodless. And it didn’t disfigure, like other, harsher substances that might leave her face frozen forever in an anguish of rigor mortis which would ruin its symmetry and lessen the effect of the terribly perfect jawline. And best of all, it was difficult to diagnose, and therefore difficult to combat with antidotes. It was, Danae slurred into her sister’s ear, irrevocable.