When my husband and I got married, we moved into his parents’ house for a while. At first, my mother-in-law and I got along really well.
She kept telling me the same thing:
“You’re my daughter now too.”
In the evenings, she was especially attentive to me.
Every night around ten, she knocked on our bedroom door holding a glass of warm milk.
“Drink this before bed. It will help you sleep.”
I have never liked milk, but I did not want to seem rude by saying no.
She usually stood right next to me and waited.
“All of it. Don’t leave a drop.”
For the first few days, nothing seemed strange.
Then I began to notice what that milk did to me. Twenty minutes after drinking it, I was fast asleep. I slept so heavily that some mornings I could not remember my husband coming home from work and getting into bed beside me.
One morning he told me, surprised:
“I tried to wake you last night. You didn’t even move.”
I laughed and blamed it on being tired. But it kept happening almost every night, and soon I was waking up with a heavy, foggy head.
When I mentioned it to my husband, he just shrugged.
“I haven’t noticed anything. You’re imagining things.”
Then came the evening that changed everything. I was lying in bed with a magazine when I heard my mother-in-law’s footsteps in the hallway. I knew what was coming. The milk again.
But this time, she stopped outside the door, turned around and walked back to the kitchen.
Something made me curious. I slipped out of bed and quietly followed her.
The kitchen was almost dark, with only the small lamp above the stove switched on. She stood with her back to me, and my glass of milk was on the counter in front of her.
Then she took a small box out of her pocket.
She opened it, took out a pill and crushed it with a spoon until it turned into powder. She tipped the powder into my glass and stirred it carefully.
A chill went through my whole body.
I made it back to the bedroom just seconds before she opened the door with her usual warm smile.
“Here you go, drink up.”
I took the glass. For the first time, I did not drink a single sip.
“I’ll wash up first.”
“You can wash later,” she snapped. “The milk will get cold.”
I looked her straight in the eye.
“I’ll drink it.”
She lingered for a few more seconds and then finally left. I poured the milk into the flower pot by the window and got back into bed.
Half an hour later, I switched off the light and pretended to be asleep.
About an hour went by. The house went completely quiet. My husband was working late that night.
Then the bedroom door slowly creaked open.
I did not move a muscle.
My mother-in-law walked in, and she was not alone. Next to her stood a man I had never seen before, about forty-five, in a dark jacket, glancing around nervously.
My stomach dropped.
She stepped up to the bed, looked down at me and whispered to him:
“See, she’s out cold. The money first.”
I could not stay still any longer. I sat straight up in bed.
“What is going on here?”
The man jumped back in shock. My mother-in-law went pale.
“You… why aren’t you asleep?”
“Who is this man? What money are you talking about?”
I screamed so loudly the neighbors must have heard. My mother-in-law tried to come closer.
“Calm down, you’ve got it all wrong.”
“Stay away from me!”
I grabbed my phone from the nightstand. The stranger was already heading for the door.
“I’m out. I want no part of this.”
“Stop!” I shouted. “I’m calling the police!”
My mother-in-law tried to pull the phone out of my hand, but I pushed her away and ran into the hallway. My hands were shaking so badly that I could hardly dial.
Within minutes, the police were at the house. The man never made it out. Officers stopped him right at the front door.
When I told them about the milk and the pills, one of the officers took the glass and the little box my mother-in-law had not had time to hide.
I still do not know exactly what she was planning that night or why she brought that man into our room, though I have some terrible guesses.
That same night, I left that house for good.
But one thing became painfully clear to me. All those evenings when she stood by my bed with a glass of milk and softly said, “Drink it, it will help you sleep,” had never been about kindness at all.
