Death by Trial and Error (A Legal Suspense Short) by R. Barri Flowers

DEATH BY TRIAL AND ERROR
     
    She wanted to kill the bloody bastard.
    But how?
    Should she run him down with her car?
    She could imagine him begging for his life as
he lay wounded in the street, bones broken from head to toe. She
would make him suffer before once more rolling the car over the
damaged goods.
    And again, and again, until the life had been
snuffed out of him.
    Perhaps she should lace his chicken noodle
soup with cyanide.
    She would get a great thrill out of seeing
him clutch his burning throat in a desperate attempt to relieve his
agony. Or roll his eyes from a combination of the poison taking
effect and the sheer disbelief of it all.
    She would dance with delight watching him
squirm on the floor as if he had been possessed by the devil
himself.
    And in that final moment of distress between
life and death, she would laugh at him spitefully, the way he
surely had been laughing at her for the last six months. Or however
long it had been since he'd decided sharing another woman's bed
gave him more pleasure and passion than sharing hers.
    It was exactly one week ago that Harrison had
told her about his affair. His intonation, usually deep with
assurance and rich with confidence, had come across as flat and
unrepentant. She felt as if she had been lowered into molten lava.
Or told that she had a malignant brain tumor. The pain could not
have been any worse.
    "What—?" The word had shot from her mouth
like a cannon. She was certain she had misunderstood him. Or even
if she had understood him correctly, he surely couldn't have meant
that which she feared most.
    Maybe he was only playing with her, looking
for some sort of reaction. He often liked teasing her, telling her
things that would incense her, only to laugh playfully like a
schoolboy who had pulled up a schoolgirl's dress merely for the
sake of fun and frolic.
    She hated that part of Harrison, the power he
had over her to bring her to the brink of tears, to make her feel
her whole world was about to collapse; then just as easily make her
believe she had the whole world and all its blessings in the palm
of her hand.
    With him being her most cherished
blessing.
    Yes, he brought out the best and worst in
her, often with merely a gesture, a smile, a frown, a comment, or
some other manner of communication that could only exist between a
husband and wife.
    She looked at him standing in the doorway of
the bedroom. For an instant, it was as if she had traveled back in
time some two decades earlier when she first met Harrison Kincaid
and fell in love with him the moment he flashed his megawatt smile
at her. He was tall and solidly built, as if to her specifications.
Dark, wavy hair was swept to the side and his eyes were a deep
shade of blue. They were the kind of eyes that penetrated to the
depths of your soul when he looked at you. She thought he was the
most handsome man she'd ever seen.
    And he still was.
    It had been a childless marriage, borne as
much from genetic mismatches as the decision to forgo having
children in favor of their careers and each other.
    He had gotten up, careful not to wake her,
and dressed as if it was just another day in the life of Harrison
Kincaid: author, lecturer, philanthropist, and asshole. She
wondered how long he had stood there watching her, probably
replaying his revelation over and over in his mind, trying to think
of how best to let her down easily. For all Harrison's faults, he
had always tried to cushion the blow when he had something bad to
tell her, as if he could somehow come across as an angel of mercy
rather than the devil in disguise.
    Sitting up in bed, Emma suddenly felt more
vulnerable than she ever had in her life. She saw herself as a
forty-five-year-old hag with breasts that had begun to sag, hips
that had expanded every year, and thighs that were beginning to
resemble something akin to cauliflower. Her hair, once a lustrous
shade of crimson, had become thin, flat, and seemed determined to
remain a convoluted gray no