Sweet Romance13 min read
Same Bed, Different Dreams
ButterPicks12 views
I never thought a summer trip to my mother's house would end with police tape around my bedroom and my life falling into pieces.
"I told you to rest, Mom," I said as I hugged my younger daughter and smoothed her hair in the passenger seat. "We’ll stay for a week, just to be safe."
"You always worry too much," my mother replied, smiling in the rearview mirror. "Let the girls run. I’ll keep them."
We took the country road out of the city, the girls chittering about the playground back home. The world felt ordinary, full of laundry and lunches and PTA ridiculousness. Dane always handed me his wages and went back to the lab; that had been our rhythm for eight years. That was why the call from my father-in-law felt like a wrong note.
"Marina, get back to the house. Now," Cyrus Mahmoud said, voice thin.
"What happened?" I asked, clutching the phone.
"It's… there was an incident. You should come home."
I left my mother to the girls and drove like I had wings.
By the time I reached our building the air smelled of antiseptic and metal. The front door was open. Officers in plain clothes moved like mice through the hallway. I pushed past them. The living room—our living room—was a world I didn’t recognize. Curtains drawn, couch askew, a perfume bottle shattered on the floor like glass teeth.
"Mrs. Forsberg?" one of the officers called.
"I’m Marina," I said. "Where is Dane?"
"He’s being taken down to the station," Officer Jaxon Dean answered. "We have to ask you a few questions."
"Dane?" I shouted. "They took him?"
I saw him then, coming out of our bedroom, face as pale as the sheet on our bed. He reached for me.
"Marina, don't—" he began.
"Don't what?" I pushed him away, an animal tearing free. "What did you do, Dane? What have you done?"
Two officers stepped in. "Please, both of you calm down."
Someone else appeared, a woman in a uniform I remembered from the precinct—Kamila Schulze. "Mrs. Forsberg, we need to separate you for now."
I stumbled into the hall. My stomach rolled. In the bedroom, on the bed we had made together last night, a woman lay half-covered by my nightdress. Katharine Bishop. Long chestnut hair sprawled over the pillow. Her white chemise soaked in blood.
"Oh God." I remember the sound, the way it came out of me like someone else’s voice. "That's my—"
"Your dress," Dane said under his breath. "That's my wife's—"
I hit him. The slap landed on his cheek like a verdict. "You liar," I whispered. "You liar, you used my things—"
"Two officers, take them both back to the station," Kamila said calmly. "You, and your in-laws."
They did. We sat in separate rooms, and the world narrowed to the tick of the metal clock on the wall.
"I'm Officer Kamila Schultze," she said when they brought me to an interview room. (Her badge read Schulze. I remember because there was a small glare on the metal.) "I know this is hard. I need you to tell me everything you can."
"Is Dane… did he do it?" My voice was small.
"We're investigating," she said. "Start from the beginning. Where were you today?"
I told her everything: breakfast in the town square, the shopping mall, the cake at noon, the time-stamped receipts tucked like confessions in my purse. "I can show you," I said. "All the receipts are in my bag."
"Why were you at the mall at all?" she asked.
"Because my mother’s birthday," I said. "We bought cake. I had the kids with me. I was supposed to be home later."
"Did you go back early?"
"No. I—" I swore I hadn't. But then Kamila slid a photograph across the table: a woman in a sun hat entering our building. Time stamp: 10:39 a.m. Another photo: the same woman in the elevator, watch on her wrist, a ring glinting. Time stamp: 10:45 a.m.
My heart shrank. "That watch—" I looked down at my own wrist. "I wear the same brand."
"Recognize the ring?"
"It—it's my ring." My voice broke. "I returned..."
"Mrs. Forsberg, the knife with blood on it has Dane's fingerprints. We found a tissue with ether residue and Dane's fingerprints. Witnesses saw you in the building around the time the forensic report estimates the time of death."
"No!" I screamed. "Dane—he works at the lab. He—he's a good man."
Kamila watched me with something like pity and something like steel. "We need to be careful with evidence. Sometimes people are framed. But right now, the knife has his prints and the tissue has his prints."
I wanted the floor to open. "He couldn't—" I began.
"You should know," she said softly, "that if the evidence proves you were at the scene, you will be charged. For now, you are a person of interest."
In that small room, with the hum of the fluorescent light, I began to remember pieces like shards. The week before: the nights my husband came back with anger stashed in his pockets. The slammed cupboards. The bruises I learned to hide. The words he'd typed in messages I never opened—words filled with disgust about my body and our daughters. I thought of the way he sneered when I tried to ask about money. I thought of the pregnancy test tucked under a notebook months before.
"Did he hit you?" Kamila asked suddenly.
"Yes," I said. "He started six months ago. Harder each time."
"Why didn't you go to the police?"
"Because I had nothing. Because who would hear a housewife? Because he said he'd take everything. Because I was ashamed. Because I thought—"
"Because you thought you could make it work," Kamila finished.
When they finally said my husband was being held and that the knife found had his prints, that the tissue had his prints, and that Dane had been at work for the time he claimed, something in me snapped and, for reasons I couldn't, or wouldn't, entirely explain, I lied. Or—worse—I let the lie be true.
"It's my fault," I heard myself say to Kamila. "I went home. I found them. I lost my mind. I killed her."
She stared at me. "You are sure?"
"I'm sure," I said. I told her, in messy breaths and a rush of detail that should have been a relief, the clinical map of panic and anger until the act had become a thing I could name. I told her where I had gone, how I had made a false alibi with receipts and bus tickets, how I had planned to create evidence that would point to Dane—because in my thinking, he deserved to be blamed and because I needed the money I had insisted Samuel—my brother? No, not a name—because I needed the money for the girls. I told them about the gloves I wore and the towel I used and how the knife slipped and how I left fingerprints by accident.
"Why would you do that?" Kamila asked. "And why would you try to make Dane look guilty?"
"Because he was going to leave us. Because he told me our daughters were burdens. Because he hit me. Because I wanted him to pay," I said. I told them everything then, and the city swallowed my voice like a drought swallowing a creek.
"I’m reading your statement," Kamila said from across the table. "People often confess for complicated reasons. People confess to feel in control. People confess because they are desperate. We have to verify every detail."
They verified. Photographs of wounds matched. The knife matched my description. My prints were on the handle. The tissue matched the pattern I described. The receipts were examined and seemed falsified well enough for a first look.
When the prosecutor came, he had a look that belonged to a man who had read too many scripts. "You understand your rights," he said. "You understand your statement is admissible."
"I do," I said. My throat was dry. "I killed her."
Dane screamed in court. "She's lying!" he shouted at the hearing. "She’s protecting me!"
They called witnesses. I said yes when they asked if I wanted to plead guilty. I wanted it all to be over. I wanted to pay for what I had done; I wanted to undo the rest. Instead the rest hardened.
"Why did you take the plea?" Kamila whispered during a break.
"Because I was tired," I said. "Because I'm dying, the doctor said. Because leaving the girls with that man was worse. Because if the law was going to take me, at least I could make sure the girls got money. I told the story because I wanted them to believe me. I told a story that let everything end."
They processed me. They moved me. The trial moved like thin water. The judge read a verdict that might as well have been a stopping bell. "Guilty." The room seemed to tilt, and I was inside a bubble of white light. "Sentenced to death."
I did not argue. I did not react. I sat still as everyone else filled the spaces I left behind with their own noise.
On the day before my execution, I received a visit from Kamila. "I have something to tell you," she said, uncharacteristically nervous. "Someone delivered some cash to my precinct. Twenty thousand in new bills, hidden in an envelope with nothing but a note: 'Look upstairs.'"
I watched her face as she said it. "Look upstairs? Where?"
"2308," she said. "We traced a call. Gideon Pohl rents 2308."
"Gideon?" The name settled like a stone. "He's the data analyst in Dane's department. He dated Katharine in college."
"Yes." She swallowed. "We found evidence upstairs. Prints that matched a second set—Gideon’s. He had registered for a rental through someone else. He'd been there the day of the murder."
My heart climbed into my throat.
"Why did you confess if you didn't—" she started.
"I wanted to save the girls a life with Dane," I said. "Or... I wanted someone to hate me enough that they'd leave them alone. I wanted money stashed. I wanted a story that could be papered over. I thought—"
"You thought you'd protect them," Kamila finished.
"They wouldn't be alone," I said. "I believed that. I didn't want to be at the center of their lives anymore. I thought putting the crime on me would stop Dane from being dragged through the mud more. I thought it would... I don't know what I thought."
Kamila's fingers drummed on the table. "We dug further. We found Gideon’s prints in the shower tiles. We found a mechanism in his phone—the electronic dial that called Katharine at a precise minute. And we found transfers. He had given money to someone. We traced some payments to a hidden account."
"He paid me twenty thousand," I said quietly. "He promised to give me more if I did what we planned. He wanted her gone."
"You were a pawn," Kamila said.
"So I was executed for being his pawn?" My laugh was a thin fissure. "What kind of justice is that?"
"We're trying to correct it," she said. "We have him in custody now. But it's messy. Officers ruined my file. I was sanctioned for not opening the wider search earlier. The station criticized me. The paperwork is explosive. The legal world is slow."
When they finally took Gideon Pohl into custody, they did it with a warrant and a camera crew. I sat in my cell with the metal bunk beneath me and watched as the world, which had been black and white, slid into gray.
They brought Gideon to the public hearing in the municipal hall, not the closed courtroom where we had pleaded, because the media smelled a scandal and the prosecutor wanted a public reckoning.
The hall filled. People who had followed the case in bits—neighbors, journalists, a mother with a crying child—shuffled in. I watched from a small side room with Kamila at my side.
"Gideon Pohl stands accused of conspiracy to murder and of staging evidence to frame another," the prosecutor read. "We will show the timeline and how he colluded with Ms. Cooper."
"Cooper?" a reporter muttered. "That's her."
Gideon walked in like a man who had practiced his face for this occasion: composed, a touch of arrogant curiosity, as if he was spectating a show rather than being the spectacle. He had once been Katharine's college boyfriend; his face had a softness when he looked at photographs of her. The softness now seemed like a mask.
He stood and spoke into the microphone. "I loved Katharine," he said. There was no heat in his voice. "I wanted her to choose me back. She left me. I was hurt. I regretted it. I never wanted her dead."
The prosecutor's cross-examination began to erode him like water on clay.
"Why did you rent 2308 under a false name?" the prosecutor demanded.
"Because I needed privacy to deal with our problems," Gideon answered, voice tight.
"We have surveillance placing you at the building at 10:05 a.m. on the day of the murder," the prosecutor said. "We have your print in the bathroom tiles. We have XML logs of your phone setting an automatic dial to Katharine at 10:20 a.m. We have payments—a twenty-thousand transfer to Ms. Cooper for a 'favor.' Did you intend to buy a favor?"
Gideon swallowed. The room shifted like a pressure change. "I... paid her to confront them. I wanted a scene. I wanted to expose them. I didn't expect murder."
"You provided the means—"
"The woman did it!" Gideon snapped. "She came back. She was mad. She did it alone."
"Your fingerprints are on a paper towel found near the body. Your prints are on shower tiles where you were hiding. CCTV shows you using a car that you had possession of that morning. You were on top of the building until 10:40, then you returned. You placed an ether-laced tissue at the scene. You created an electronic call to manufacture alibis. Then you left the crime to be discovered. Why, Mr. Pohl? Why go to such lengths?"
He stared like a man who had grown small. The first shift in him was a flicker of color—there was no denial left in his face, only the attempt to bargain for dignity.
"If I had meant for her to die—" he began, then stopped.
The prosecutor slid forward. "So you admit you created the scenario that resulted in her death."
"I didn't mean to," he whispered. "I was jealous. I wanted evidence that would humiliate Dane. I was angry. I wanted to hurt him, not kill."
"Your actions show premeditation," the prosecutor said. "You created the call log, the false alibi, the narcotic tissue, and you compensated Ms. Cooper for her role."
Gideon's composure unraveled. His speech cadence shortened, a man's defenses collapsing into irresolute fragments. "I couldn't stand to see her with him," he said. "I thought if I made it unbearable for them, they'd break up and I'd get her back."
"You ruined three lives," the prosecutor said. "You ruined yourself."
The chamber seemed to hold its breath. Witnesses took the stand. Neighbors testified to seeing a man at the roof at odd hours. Two lab technicians confirmed the ether residue likely came from a canister Gideon had access to in his lab days. The accounts—bank traces—showed transfers from a shell account connected to Gideon to a disposable card that paid into an envelope for "a favor."
The public reaction shifted like weather. Murmurs drowned into a cry of outrage. "Shame!" someone called. "How could you?" said another.
Then the punishment scene began.
It was not the quiet, sterile justice of a closed courtroom. The municipal hall had been packed beyond seating. Television cameras lined the perimeter like vultures. The prosecutor requested—demanded—that the court allow the family of Katharine and other victims to make statements before sentencing. The judge consented.
Katharine's mother came forward. She steadied herself at the podium and looked at Gideon like a woman seeing the man who had stolen not only her daughter's breath but the future she had imagined. "You took my child," she said, voice loud enough to ripple through the hall. "You promised to love her and instead you planned her death. You were supposed to be a partner. Now you will live under the weight of that choice for the rest of your days."
Behind her, the crowd hissed. A man from the lab—someone Dane had mentored—stepped forward and threw a stack of printed emails at Gideon's feet. "You smiled at me at lunch," he said. "You told me you were lonely. You strangled that loneliness into violence with your hands."
Judges allowed the family to read statements—more and more people came forward. A co-worker recounted how Gideon had shown him a ledger of transactions. A neighbor described seeing Gideon on nights he claimed to have been home. The audience recorded every word on phones. The hall pulsed with noise.
Gideon’s complexion went from sallow to gray. His refusal to meet anyone's eyes evaporated. "Please," he whispered at one point, looking small and suddenly human, the camera catching the tremor at the corner of his mouth. He tried to speak for himself, to justify or to shrink into remorse. "I was foolish. I—I didn't mean—"
"But you did," cried Katharine's friend. "You put pieces in place. You set it up. You paid for it. You watched the chaos you created."
The crowd's reaction moved through stages. First surprise—people murmured at the twists of betrayal. Then anger—fists clenched, voices rose. Then a sharp, cold satisfaction as the truth came to light. Cameras zoomed into Gideon's face as his public dignity disintegrated into a range: a brief flash of vanity, then denial, then pleading, then a cracked, desperate apology.
"You wanted her back," the judge observed. "Instead you destroyed two families."
The judge pronounced his sentence: decades in prison, restitution to the family, and a public shame order—a court-mandated public apology posted on the company website and broadcast channels—an old-fashioned shaming for a modern crime. The courtroom erupted: some applauded; others booed; someone shouted "Justice!" in a voice not inclined to subtlety.
Gideon’s last visible reaction on that day was not a howl but a hollowing. He slumped, a man unstitched. As they led him out, some in the crowd spat; some recorded; some turned away. The face that had once toyed with jealousy now reflected the loss of what he had once been allowed to be: a man who believed in redemption but had not earned it.
I watched all of this from the drugged distance of my cell. The vindication that followed the truth could not touch me. My execution went as scheduled. My children's foster arrangements were settled. Kamila brought them blankets. She carried my last note to them in her pocket—a promise she later kept.
When they came to take me, I didn't fight. I had spent my last energies on the lie and on my mother's small hidden box of money that I'd never touch again.
In the last minutes, Officer Kamila held my hand. "I tried to stop them," she said. "It took me too long."
"I know," I said. "You did what you could."
Her eyes were red. "I will tell the world the truth," she promised. "I will keep watching your girls."
"I don’t want pity," I said. "Just make it clear to them why I did it. Not as an excuse. As a warning."
I walked the last walk, and then everything ended.
After they executed the sentence, they reopened the case, and more evidence was collected. Gideon’s final punishment in public was more than legal; it was a slow unraveling. His name, once respectable in the lab and in quiet circles, was read on broadcasts with the word "murder" beside it. Former friends turned away. He walked out of court not in triumph but in shame, while the world found new ways to name him.
Months after, at a small funeral for Katharine, Dane came to my mother's house. He was different—hollowed, not by prison, but by grief and the exposure of all his small cruelties. He pleaded, stumbling over words, for those he had lost.
"Why didn't you leave sooner?" Kathleen Guerrero—my mother-in-law—asked him at one point, eyes blistered with anger.
He had no good answer. His abuse would not be cured by public shame. People who had once ignored his cruelty now turned away; he was left to live in the echo of what he'd done.
I cannot tell you that justice was clean. It never is. I can't promise you that my girls grew up without the shadow of my final act. They were clothed, fed, and provided for, and Kamila kept her word, as did the lawyer who fought for their custody. But grief is a complicated room. It has many doors, and some of them close forever.
When the story in the papers faded and reporters chased newer scandals, the municipal hall's footage stayed in archives. Gideon served his sentence. Dane found a small apartment and a quiet job far from the lab, his hands empty of the arrogance that had once tilted him. Katharine's mother moved towns.
Sometimes at night Kamila wrote to me in a series of short letters I never received, letters she read to my daughters in time. She told them, "Your mother was human. She loved you. She made a terrible choice. She was also abused and desperate. You should know both things."
I think about those letters. I think about the cheap perfume bottle, about the clock and the receipts, about the fabric of our ordinary life torn apart. I think about how easy it is for a life to slip into a story you no longer understand. And I think about the one thing I wanted: a quiet life where my daughters would not go hungry and where the hands that struck me would be kept away by law and by shame.
If the world is a room of faces, mine is now a blank wall. But the people who saw me—Kamila, the judge, the public—remember. They retell the story not in neat moral lines but in the messy truth that justice and pity sometimes reach different ends.
The End
— Thank you for reading —