Bitter Mortar

In the humid twilight of a Georgia mill town, Irene Calloway has spent eighteen years as the silent partner in her husband’s construction empire—a name on deeds, a smile at banquets, a body in his bed. When he files for divorce to marry his young architect protégée and severs Irene from her late father’s land holdings, she does not fight. Instead, she begins to bake. With each batch of his favorite pecan pralines, she feeds him a rare fungal toxin that mimics progressive heart failure. Her revenge is not for money, nor for love—it is for the slow, exquisite joy of watching the man who erased her vanish from the world while she kneads dough and hums.