The Mirror and the Mask by Ellen Hart

his breakfast in the kitchen while reading the local paper. She set her overnight bag next to the island. The pitiful pantomime she’d once thought of as a marriage was about to begin again.
    Jack asked her how the roads were. He didn’t really care. She told him they were fine. They hadn’t been. He rumpled the newspaper, turned a page, nodded to the coffee, said it was fresh. She poured herself a cup. Sat down across from him. The mail was on the counter. She sipped her coffee. He sipped his. Neither looked at the other.
    It was surreal, acting as if nothing had changed when in a matterof days he would no longer . . . be. The whole idea seemed so utterly impossible that she wondered if she’d dreamed it. But looking at him, at his garish Hawaiian shirt, at a face she’d once found so handsome but now caused nothing but revulsion, she saw more clearly than ever before that she had no other way out.
    Susan had never understood killing, not even in war. Taking a life seemed incomprehensible. When she heard about murders on the nightly news, it was always at a distance. She might think for a moment about the strange mind that wielded the knife or pulled the trigger, but it had nothing to do with her. She lived a normal, orderly existence. As soon as the subject on the TV changed, the violence was all but forgotten. And yet here she was, about to become the person those anchorpeople talked about in disgusted, semidetached tones. Sitting across from Jack, watching him shovel breakfast cereal into that yawning void of a mouth, the mystery revealed itself.
    Murder was an act of profound ego. It was the voice inside the soul screaming,
I want
.
I deserve
.
I take because I can
.
    While finishing his breakfast, Jack asked where she’d stayed the night. She answered easily. Conversation proceeded in the usual way. He had a noon meeting. Sunny had already left for school. Susan’s sister had called last night from Fort Worth, said she’d try to reach Susan after church on Sunday. Nothing urgent, she just wanted to check in. But in all the normality, Susan could feel something slip from her grasp. One minute everything was fine and the next the room had turned airless and blurry. A powerful tension heated up inside her. Was it then that Jack began looking at her in that critical way of his? She’d always thought of it as X-ray vision, afraid that he could see inside her. Her words grew stilted. The gaps between comments seemed to grow longer.
    Susan couldn’t stand it another second. “Is something wrong?” she asked.
    â€œWrong? With me? No.”
    â€œIt’s probably me. I thought we’d seen the bottom of the housing market, but it’s still dropping. I guess I’m a little preoccupied.”
    â€œJoin the club.” He got up, set his dishes in the sink. “We need to relax, chill out. Why don’t you join me in the hot tub?”
    She hesitated. It was the last thing she wanted. “Sure. Good idea.”
    He turned back to her before he left the room, stared at her for a couple of extra seconds, then said he had to run back up to his study and make a quick call. She smiled at him, told him to take his time, that she planned to work from home for the rest of the day. There was no hurry.
    And so it went, Susan scrutinizing each new shift in topic, taking Jack’s emotional temperature every few minutes, weighing each word on the slippery scale of normality. She learned one important truth over the course of the morning. Spending time with a man you’re about to kill was agonizing.
    Â 
    Ever on the tip of readiness, Cordelia had formulated a plan. No noodling around on the Internet for her. She believed in direct assault.
    Cordelia Thorn was a supersized woman, six feet tall and well—
well
—over two hundred pounds. She was also drop-dead gorgeous in a curvaceous, Queen Latifah sort of way. More to the point, she knew how to use her