And in that moment, everything changed.
The next morning, I called Frank Donovan. We met at a small cafe in the Pearl District at 6:00 a.m., before the city woke up.
Frank was already there when I arrived, sitting in the back corner with two cups of coffee. He’d been Richard’s oldest friend—forty years on the Portland Police Force before he retired and opened his own investigation firm. If anyone could help me, it was him.
I sat down and slid the Ziploc bag across the table. Inside were three pills—small, white, identical to the vitamins Vanessa had been giving me every morning for the past four months.
“I need you to test these,” I said. “And I need you to test my blood.”
Frank picked up the bag and studied it under the cafe’s dim light.
“What do you think is in them?”
“Something that’s making me sick,” I said. “Something she’s been putting in my food, my drinks—everything.”
He nodded slowly. “I’ll take care of it.”
Two weeks later, he called.
“Come to my office,” he said. “You need to see this.”
Frank’s office was above a bookstore on Northwest 23rd. The room smelled like old paper and stale coffee. He had documents spread across his desk—lab reports, toxicology results, chemical analyses.
He handed me the first page.
Oregon Health and Science University. Blood toxicology report. Patient: Diane Westbrook. Date: January 15th, 2025.
Arsenic concentration: 0.8 mg per liter. Normal range: less than 0.03 mg per liter.
I stared at the numbers. My hands started shaking.
“You’re being poisoned,” Frank said quietly. “Slowly. Deliberately. If you’d kept taking those pills for another six months, you would have experienced complete liver failure. Another year, and you’d be gone.”
He handed me the second report, the analysis of the pills.
“Each capsule contains 2.5 mg arsenic trioxide.”
I felt the air leave my lungs.
“We need to arrest her,” I said. “Now.”
Frank shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Frank, she’s been poisoning me for months.”
“And if we arrest her now,” he interrupted, “she gets five years for assault with a harmful substance. Maybe ten for attempted harm with aggravating circumstances. But that’s not enough, Diane.”
He leaned forward.
“We need to catch her in the act of something bigger. The forged will, the conspiracy with her lawyer, the plan to eliminate your son after she gets the money. If we wait—if we let her think she’s winning—we can bury her for twenty-five years, maybe life.”
I stared at him. “You want me to keep pretending I’m dying?”
“I want you to control the game,” he said. “You’ve been surviving for eight months. You can survive three more. And when we’re done, she won’t just lose. She’ll be destroyed.”
I looked down at the arsenic report in my hands. The numbers blurred.
“What do I have to do?”
“Stop taking her pills,” Frank said. “Replace them with real vitamins, but keep acting sick. Fall down the stairs. Forget appointments. Shake when you hold your coffee cup. Make her think the poison is working.”
He pulled out a notebook.
“I’ll start surveillance. I’ll follow her. Record her conversations. Find out who she’s working with. And when we have everything—when we have proof of conspiracy, forgery, and planning harm—we move. Not before.”
I nodded slowly.
“How long?”
“Three months,” he said. “Maybe four. I need time to build the case.”
I took a deep breath. “All right. We wait.”
For the next three months, I became an actress. I fell. I forgot. I trembled. I let Vanessa help me to the bathroom. I let her smile and bring me soup and tell Trevor how worried she was about me.
And the whole time, Frank was watching.
In late April, he called me. It was 10 p.m. I was sitting in the dark in Richard’s office, staring at the city lights.
“Diane,” Frank said. “I found something, and it’s worse than we thought.”
My chest tightened. “Tell me.”
“It’s not just the poison,” he said. “Vanessa and someone else—a lawyer named Douglas Crane—are planning to eliminate Trevor after they get the money. After they think you’re gone.”
I closed my eyes. “Tell me everything.”
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