At 2:40 in the morning, the phone jolted me out of a dead sleep.
A cold, serious man's voice came through:
"Hello, is this Veronica Fox? This is the police station for your district."
"At around 2:13 this morning, a man named Drew Harding died at his home. His mother has filed a report saying you're responsible for his death. Please come to the station immediately to assist with the investigation."
My mind went blank. Whatever sleep had been in me was gone.
Drew Harding. The blind date I'd met for the first time earlier that day.
A healthy young man. How could he just die?
And what did any of it have to do with me?
1
Drew Harding was really dead.
I pushed down the shock and the panic clawing up in me, threw my clothes on, and rushed to the station.
I hadn't even reached the front doors before I heard a middle-aged woman wailing at the top of her lungs.
The second I stepped inside, Drew's mother, her eyes bloodshot, charged at me and slapped me across the face, hard.
Crack!
My head snapped to the side, my ear ringing, half my face going numb and hot in an instant.
She clamped down on my arm, nails digging into the flesh, her face twisted like she wanted to tear me apart and swallow me whole.
"You murderer, you poison! How dare you! My son was perfectly fine, and he goes on one blind date with you and now he's gone, just like that!"
"How can you live with yourself! How do you even sleep at night!"
An officer moved in fast to pull her back and stop her, telling her the case hadn't been ruled on yet,
that everything had to wait for the investigation, that she couldn't go around hurting people or throwing out accusations.
But she was long past listening, thrashing against him, tears mixing with the raw hatred on her face, her screams filling the whole room.
"My son died right after seeing her! She drove him to it, she's the one who killed him! She owes me my son's life!"
Suffocation. Despair. It all came down on me at once.
I'd gone on one blind date with her son. How had that turned me into his killer?
The officers took Drew's mother off to an interview room to give her statement.
I sat on the cold bench, waiting to be called in, and my thoughts drifted back to that afternoon, to the blind date over dinner.
My career was on the rise, and settling down early had never been part of the plan.
But I couldn't hold out against my parents nagging and pressuring me day after day, always telling me with red-rimmed eyes
that the relatives were all talking behind my back, that there had to be something wrong with me if I didn't want to get married, that I'd made them lose face with the whole family.
Drew Harding was the "perfect match" they'd handpicked for me off a well-known local matchmaking platform,
a graduate of a top university, mid-level management at a big corporation, with a house and a car, steady and family-minded, no bad habits.
They'd told me about him thrilled, like they'd struck gold.
"Sweetheart, a good man with credentials like that is a hot commodity. Miss this one and you'll never find another."
"Just go and meet him. What if you two hit it off?"
Looking at the pleading in their eyes, I gave in and agreed to the date.
Drew and I met at a restaurant. The whole thing lasted less than an hour, and he was distracted the entire time.
Every few minutes he'd catch himself glancing at his phone, tapping out a couple of replies.
I could tell something was off with him, so I asked, politely:
"Do you have something you need to take care of? If you're busy, we can wrap this up early. There's no need to sit here just for my sake."
Drew flipped his phone face-down in a hurry, forced out a stiff smile, and waved it off.
"No, no, just a small work thing, nothing serious. So, uh, what do you think of me?"
Honestly? Not much.
He kept saying he wanted to get to know me for real, but he was somewhere else the whole time, made only small talk, and half the time couldn't even keep up with what I was saying.
I stayed polite the whole way through, warm in my replies, wanting nothing more than to finish the dinner so I could report back to my parents.
Once he picked up on my gentle brush-off, Drew suddenly turned attentive, almost eager, going out of his way to start conversation for the rest of the meal.
He even produced a finely made rose-gold bracelet as a gift for our first meeting.
After dinner he wanted to see me home too, everything he said dripping with interest, hinting he wanted to take things further.
I didn't take the bracelet, and I made it clear I didn't want a next time. I got my own cab home.
I never once imagined that this halfhearted, forgettable blind date would turn, in the dead of night, into a matter of a man's life.
