Look.

You're great and all. In the gratis services you do, really.

Like cracking jokes at the expense of bloodfeuding with your other neighbor. Did it awfully well that water she'd been chugging spritzed burningly through her nostrils. And yeah, shouldersmacking you was your comeuppance. But, truth is, it's stupid.

You turn her all softhearted and gooey and loose. The stress, she forgets, for a moment. Maternally and maritally and financially and so on.

So, to see you horrorstruck at eventide, as she delivers your ordered cupcakes, this sloppy, really amateurish butcherwork you've done here—spattering red everyfuckingwhere—well. It spells divine decree.

Like ink spill, red is puddling below the said nextdoor tenant's knifejabbed windpipe. Fulls the gaps of the cedar floorboards. Soils the adjacent creamwall. The goddamn woolrug. At her teendom, she would've done a better job scrubbing their au pair's bloodstrewn flesh off your livingroom's hydrophilic carpet.

Actually, she wouldn't even coexist amongst this ferric, grotesque fume right now. Mom's tamperproofed the Quinn's money. Lawyers aren't easy to buy when you're not the favorite child.

She should've been closing up the bakery, heading home to Henry.

God, her Henry. Her baby, sleeping blissfully.

Yet, here she is. Heave-rolling a deadweight into a carpettortilla's human filling. Going through the motions of What Would Joe Goldberg—Her Psychotic Serialkiller of a Husband—Do?

"Why are you just standing there?"

Shit. She swallows, sweat dribbling her forehead. Raising her voice was unintentional. God knows a pang just twisted her chest. Like she's the pierced victim.

"Help me carry this to the car," she heaves. Flattens the carpet's exposed underside. "We'll burn it in the woods."

She won't say Joe taught her this trick. You'll classify L&J as insane. This is her returning the favor. For all the times you've helped her in this pompous, highfenced hellscape that is Madre Linda. So, maybe. All is forgiven.