Adjacent

On Christmas Day 2025, the public water supply of Bristol is opened to a contaminant that will kill ninety-four people before the week is out.

By the time the police are at her door, Sarah Bonner already knows. She has been sitting in her kitchen with the radio on since two in the afternoon, ringing the husband who will not answer.

Andrew Bonner was a cybersecurity engineer. A quiet man, a grieving father, a husband who had moved into the back bedroom and stopped speaking at meals. He was, it would turn out, a man who had been planning this for years.

This is the story of the year that followed — an inquiry, a funeral, a country, and one woman’s slow, precise reckoning with what it means to have sat opposite the wrong man for sixteen years and not known.