They were trying to start over.

Reno was the kind of place a person goes when they want to be somewhere that is not the place they are leaving. Not beautiful in the way San Francisco is beautiful, not hills and fog and the architectural assertion of a city that knows it matters. Reno was flat and bright and surrounded by desert and mountains and the particular emptiness of a place where no one is watching.

Steve had set up a bug-out apartment earlier during the security period, a physical Plan B stocked with the things a person needs if they leave quickly. The apartment was a loft in a newly built complex on 3rd Street: a pool, a Korean restaurant on the ground floor, a small organic grocery with what turned out to be the best meat counter Steve had found in any city he had lived in. Dan had furnished it from outlet stores and Costco: a big ottoman, a glass table, shelves that Steve filled with his own books. Board games stacked in a closet. Tall windows. It was, Aunt K said, cute. It felt like an adventure. The liquor cabinet from the house on Vermont Street sat against the wall, carried across state lines the way furniture is carried, as proof that a previous life existed.

Aunt K was pregnant.

The pregnancy was early, new enough to be a possibility more than a certainty, the weeks when the body is doing something extraordinary and the mind is catching up. They had not told people yet. The knowledge existed between them like a held breath.

Around Christmas, one evening, they opened a bottle of wine.

The bottle was from the Potrero Hill years. A red, the kind that accumulates in a person’s collection and gets carried from apartment to apartment because it is not special enough to open on a special occasion but too good to throw away. It had been in the liquor cabinet. It had made the trip from San Francisco to Reno. It had been sitting on a shelf in the bug-out apartment for months.

They had picked up food from the grocery downstairs. Steve was grilling it in a pan that was too small and too thin, the kind that comes with a furnished apartment, with too much butter to compensate for the surface. The bottles from the liquor cabinet sat on the high-top counter that served, with two stools, as their dining room.

They drank it.

Within hours, both of them were extremely ill.

Not wine-sick. Not the headache of too much tannin or the sluggishness of too much alcohol. This was systemic — nausea, dizziness, a violent wrongness that was severe and specific and identical in both of them. The same onset. The same progression. The same symptoms arriving simultaneously in two people who had shared one bottle.

The nausea was not in the stomach. It was deeper — intestinal, the body rejecting something at the level of the gut wall itself. Cramping came in waves, each wave bringing a sweat that had nothing to do with fever. The illness did not follow the arc of food poisoning, which announces itself, does its work, and passes. By the next morning it had not passed. By the morning after that it had settled into something worse — not acute distress but a persistent wrongness, as though the illness had found a layer of the body it intended to stay in.

Aunt K lost the baby.

The miscarriage happened in the days that followed. The pregnancy that had been a held breath released, and what was left was the absence of what had been forming and the specific grief of a loss that is biological and personal and impossible to describe to anyone who has not experienced it.

Steve held Aunt K through it.

He did not know what to say. The pregnancy had existed between them for weeks as a held breath, a private certainty, and now the breath released into grief. Steve believed the illness and the loss were connected to the bottle. Aunt K had not been the target, in his understanding. She had opened a bottle of wine in a kitchen in Reno — the most ordinary act. He wondered whether Tara had known who would eventually open it, or whether it had simply sat on its shelf, waiting.

Steve sat with the loss the way a person sits with a loss that has no process — no filing, no court date, no evidence index. Aunt K was in the next room and the pregnancy was gone and the bottle was empty on the counter. The apartment was quiet. His own body had been failing for years without his understanding why. He understood what had happened to them through that history.

The days that followed had no structure. Aunt K slept and woke and slept again. Steve cleaned the apartment the way a person cleans when there is nothing else to do with their hands — the counters, the stove, the pan that was too small and too thin. He did not move the bottle. He could not have said why. It sat on the counter among the other bottles from the liquor cabinet, its label no different from theirs. The knowledge that it was different lived in his body the way the illness itself had lived — certain, unnamed, occupying a place no amount of cleaning could reach.

Documentary note. The report shown here is Steve’s urine test, collected July 31, 2019 and printed August 6 — before the December evening this chapter describes. It is not a test of the wine. The bottle analysis and Aunt K’s paired results remain part of Steve’s account; those reports have not yet been located. The urine result does not replace his fourth discovery.

Six hundred forty-nine point eight seven nanograms per gram of creatinine. The number is on the report. So is the label on the comparison column: Common Range of Positive Results.

The report does not say that the comparison range was established for transplant patients. It records the substance and the quantity measured in this urine specimen. It does not identify the source of exposure, who was responsible for it, or its relationship to the Reno illness.

The laboratory commentary describes mycophenolic acid as an immunosuppressant and discusses its effects on immune cells. It also identifies Penicillium fungus as a producer of the substance. The presence of MPA therefore cannot, by itself, establish that a pharmaceutical was deliberately administered.

Steve says he had not received an organ transplant and had no prescription for mycophenolate. He regarded the result as part of the evidence of poisoning. The result belongs alongside his history and the other records; it does not independently establish the source or cause of every illness described here.

The report’s commentary discusses miscarriage and congenital-malformation risks associated with pregnancy exposure. It does not evaluate Aunt K, establish her exposure, or determine the cause of her pregnancy loss. Those are separate questions from what was measured in Steve’s July urine specimen.

Steve also describes testing performed on Aunt K.

He recalls her first result as fourteen times the comparison range and a later result as zero.

To Steve, the sequence connected the shared wine, their illness, the pregnancy loss and the testing he remembers. It formed part of the larger pattern he was trying to document.

He concluded that the wine was the source and that it had been poisoned before he left San Francisco. That is his account of the bottle: carried across state lines, stored among ordinary bottles, opened months later. The separately located urine report does not establish that conclusion on its own.

Steve sat in the apartment and looked at the laboratory report.

This was the fourth discovery.

The first had been the lithium test in March 2017: 1.1 micrograms per milligram of creatinine, against a printed interval of 0.008–0.18. That is about six times the printed upper value. The report describes this specimen as post-provocation, following DMPS, and says its reference intervals represent a non-provoked population. Its commentary nevertheless calls the lithium concentration unexpectedly high. Both the result and that qualification belong in the record.

The second had been the Brooklyn night in 2017: the dissociative fog after taking the same Adderall he had taken for years. The tamper screws at eleven o’clock when he left. Not at eleven o’clock when he returned. No test run. No sample preserved. The Brooklyn episode lived in the space between what Steve experienced and what could be proven.

The third had been Abby Tedla’s confession in the kitchen: her brother in the FBI had told her to tell Steve what she knew. Tara had been putting Seroquel in his wine. She had asked Abby to help. She had asked Bryan to help. Tedla’s declaration and Tara’s later admission are preserved in the record. A January 2018 blood report confirming Seroquel has not yet been located.

Now the fourth, in Steve’s sequence: the Reno bottle and the illness and loss he connects to it.

Lithium. Seroquel. Mycophenolic acid. Suspected hallucinogens. These were the substances Steve associated with the episodes across those years. Their evidentiary records differ: laboratory reports, testimony and personal recollection do not document the same things. The Brooklyn episode, as he describes it here, had no preserved sample or test. The records located for this edition do not show a measured spike and clearance for every substance.

His conclusion was that the illnesses had been poisoning.

For Steve, the immunosuppressant result offered an explanation for the years of infections and the symptoms doctors had attributed to Lyme disease, chronic fatigue and babesia. He recalls symptoms arriving at home and receding when he traveled. That connection is his assessment of the history, not a diagnosis established by the urine report.

Steve put the laboratory report on the counter.

Aunt K was in the next room. She had lost a pregnancy. Steve connected that loss with the illness after the shared bottle. The loss could not be measured in nanograms per gram; it existed in the space between what had been forming and what would never form.

The mountains outside the window were dark. The desert was dark. Reno’s lights blinked in the distance like a city pretending it did not know it existed.

The wine bottle was empty.

In Steve’s account, the bottle had carried the poisoning across state lines and across years: wine poisoned in San Francisco, packed, carried to Reno and set on a shelf. What troubled him was the delay: whoever opened it would encounter something prepared long before.

They opened it. That weekend, Aunt K lost the pregnancy.

The Reno bottle was his fourth discovery. It was also what made him think of the poisoning as preparation that could outlast a person’s presence: something stored among familiar bottles, in a room where they read books and played board games and grilled dinner in a pan that was too small.

The distance between the act and its consequence — that, in his reading, was the design.