Sweet Poison

While her parents chat on the terrace, Emma explores. She finds something beautiful among the weeds: black berries that shine like jewels. Blueberries, she thinks.

She eats one.

Thirty minutes later, Emma is dead.

The autopsy reveals an ancient name: Atropa belladonna. Belladonna. A poison that has grown in that same spot for centuries, planted by hands long buried underground. Laura, her mother, will discover that her daughter is not the first. That this thicket has claimed lives for generations. That knowledge, mixed with childlike innocence, can be lethal.

That there are mistakes from which you never recover. And that some poisons don't just destroy the body.

How much of you dies when you lose your daughter?