On the morning my husband tried to kill me, I spent two hours on my knees asking God to protect him. That is the part that still steals my breath whenever I think about it. Not the poison. Not the handwritten note, or the way he tucked it carefully under the tape of the food bag like he was being romantic.
Not even the cold, methodical planning behind all of it. What haunts me is the image of myself on the braided prayer rug in our bedroom, eyes squeezed shut, whispering his name into the quiet of the morning, asking the Lord to keep him safe from all harm and bring him home to me whole. I was praying for my killer. God has a way of answering prayers we did not know how to ask.
I have learned to trust that, even when the answer looks nothing like what I expected. His name is Randall Thorn. Randall Edward Thorn, if you want the name they read aloud in court. For eight years I was Lauren Thorn, wife of a Chicago real estate developer, living in a three-story house in Lincoln Park, with ornate ceilings and a kitchen I once loved, and a marriage that had been rotting from the inside longer than I wanted to admit.
I folded his dress shirts the way he liked. I kept his coffee at the temperature he preferred. I told myself, with the kind of stubbornness that gets mistaken for faith in a struggling marriage, that a quiet relationship was still a good one. I was wrong about that.
I was wrong about many things back then. But I want to be careful and precise in telling this story, because the truth matters here in ways that any inaccurate telling could ruin. I did not know what Randall was planning that Tuesday morning. There was no ominous warning, no dream the night before, no voice whispering a caution in the dark.
I was just a woman so used to low-grade emotional pain that she had started confusing numbness with stability. What I actually felt, and remember clearly, was an unaccountable discomfort, the kind that settles behind the breastbone and refuses to reveal what it is. It was there when Randall came downstairs that morning and I handed him his coffee, and he looked straight through me the way you look through glass. Not at me.
Past me. After eight years of marriage, I had become part of the decor of my own home, and that morning I felt it more sharply than usual. You’re leaving early, I said. I have a busy day.
He loosened his tie and then re-tightened it, even though it was already straight. I had filed that habit away over the years without understanding what it meant. Anxiety. He was anxious about something.
I made eggs. I’ll grab something on the way. He was already turning toward the door. Already three steps ahead of his own mind.
I watched him go and told myself, as I always did in those final months, that he was under work pressure, that the warmth he once had was buried under deadlines and stress, that patience would eventually reveal it. He was having an affair. For over a year. I had found enough small evidence, a hotel receipt here, a name in a text message he had not hidden carefully enough, a certain distance in his eyes that had replaced something that used to be there, to know it deep down.
But I never said it out loud. I was afraid of the answer, and even more afraid of what would come after the answer. My parents were gone. The house we lived in, the investment accounts, most of what we had built together, was funded by my inheritance.
I thought we were building a life. Randall was calculating a way out. I learned the full structure of his plan much later, through police reports and Hector’s written statement and the materials presented at trial. But I want to tell it to you the way I understood it, piece by piece, because this story only makes sense when you see it all at once.
Randall had a driver. Bruno Castillo. Bruno had driven for him for nearly nine years, quiet and steady and far more observant than Randall ever acknowledged. The people who are mostly invisible tend to see everything.
Bruno drove Randall to client dinners and early site visits, and for the past fourteen months, he drove him almost every evening to a luxury tower in River North, where a woman named Tabitha lived on the twenty-second floor. Tabitha was patient at first. She calculated things in her own way, and she understood that a man like Randall required careful handling. But by that spring, her patience had run out.
She started making demands, and when Tabitha made demands, she backed them up with real pressure. She had documents about a financial violation in Randall’s company, a client escrow account mishandled two years prior. She had been quietly gathering evidence. In her more direct moments, she reminded Randall what those documents could do to his reputation, his license, his freedom.
Randall had no good options. Divorcing me was not simple, because most of our property and liquid assets were tied to my inheritance, legally registered in my name. If we divorced, he would walk away with a fraction of what he had grown accustomed to relying on, and that fraction would not fund the life he wanted to give Tabitha or himself. He had grown used to a certain kind of luxury, and he was not prepared to give it up.
So he arrived at the only door left in the corridor. On the morning he left our house with that look on his face and that anxious adjustment of his tie, he had spent the previous night awake beside me analyzing the logic of it all. He had concluded, with a coldness that still makes me feel dizzy when I think about it, that I was the obstacle. That if I disappeared, my inheritance would pass to him as my husband.
That he would be free. He stopped at Bella Fonte on Michigan Avenue, a Northern Italian restaurant we used to frequent in the early years of our marriage. I always ordered the same thing, sea bass with lemon and caper sauce, with the lobster bisque, which was so rich and delicious that I would close my eyes with the first spoonful. Randall knew exactly what I loved.
He ordered it for takeout, paid in cash, and returned to the car. With Bruno waiting at the curb and the glass partition raised, Randall did what he had prepared to do. He had obtained something in the previous weeks through channels he believed were untraceable. He placed it carefully in the soup, sealed the container tightly, and put the lid back on the bag.
Then he took a business card from his wallet, opened the pen he always kept in his inner jacket pocket, and wrote a note in his own handwriting. Thinking of you today. Eat every bite, my love. He placed the card under the tape of the bag and convinced himself the hardest part was over.
Then he made one unintentional mistake that brought everything crashing down. He lowered the partition and told Bruno to take the food home to the one who was always waiting at home. He said it quickly. He said it while his mind was already moving toward the board meeting where he had to perform the role of a normal person.
He did not mention my name. He did not specify our address. He gave instructions based on assumption, assuming that nine years of work had made Bruno’s mental map of his life match his own. What Randall forgot was that Bruno had not driven him home to Lincoln Park on a regular weekday evening in about fifteen months.
What Randall forgot was that, from Bruno’s quiet point of view, the one who was always waiting, who showed up clearly in the lobby camera, who always rushed toward the car when it arrived, was not me. It was Tabitha. I was the woman who had stopped watching for headlights. I was the woman who had trained herself not to wait anymore.
Bruno drove to River North. He took the elevator to the twenty-second floor. He knocked on the door of apartment 2204. Tabitha opened the door in a silk robe, took one look at the Bella Fonte bag, saw the note tucked under the tape in Randall’s handwriting, and brought it inside like a declaration of love.
Because for her, that was exactly what it was. She texted her friends about it. She posted a photo of the lobster bisque to her close friends story with a caption about feeling appreciated after a few difficult days. She sat in her kitchen with a glass of sparkling water and ate almost everything in that bag.
The police later showed me the photo. The elegant bag, the tape, the small business card propped in the frame like a prop in a romantic movie. Eat every bite, my love. And she did.
While all of that unfolded twenty-two stories above a busy Chicago street, I was in my kitchen eating vegetable broth from a cup with a spoon. I had had a deep dental cleaning two days earlier, and the left side of my jaw was still tender and sore. I had been eating soft foods all week. I was also keeping my usual Tuesday fast, a practice I had followed for years as a way to clear my mind and get back to what was real.
I was not hungry. I was anxious, with that light, unnamed worry that had been stalking me since Randall walked out the door that morning. Mrs. Fenwick, who had cared for our house for six years and watched me with a quiet, fierce loyalty, like a woman who saw another woman suffering without knowing how to name it, asked if I wanted her to make me something warm.
I told her I was heading out in the afternoon. To the outreach center on Halsted. I had promised the kids I would bring supplies. She gave me a particular look.
The look that tells me she knows I am not really talking about the outreach center. She said, Your jaw is still swollen. I said, The house is too quiet when I stay inside. She helped me load the car.
Donated school supplies, art materials, three boxes of juice cartons. I said a quiet prayer before I turned the key. The same prayer I said most days. Lord, guard this house.
And guard my husband. Return to us what was taken from us. I drove out of the driveway without knowing I was leaving the scene of a crime that had not yet happened. The call came while I was helping a group of eight-year-olds organize crayons by shade.
The number was unfamiliar. I almost let it go to voicemail, but something made me answer. Mrs. Thorn.
Bruno’s voice, immediately, and I knew just as immediately that something catastrophic was wrong. Bruno Castillo was one of the most stable people I had ever known. For nine years, I had heard nothing but a kind of calm competence in his voice. What I heard now was a man collapsing from the inside.
Mrs. Thorn, I have to tell you something. I think I did something terrible. He asked me to deliver the food to the home, to the one who is always waiting, and I thought he meant where I always deliver it.
She is always the one who… she is not breathing right. The paramedics are there. I’m outside.
I don’t know what I did. I don’t know. Bruno, I said carefully, stepping away from the children’s table. Tell me your exact location.
He gave me the River North address. I thanked the volunteer coordinator, gave her a brief explanation, and drove. When I arrived, there were two police cars and an ambulance angled at the curb. Bruno was sitting on the sidewalk in his driver’s uniform, turning his cap slowly in his hands.
He looked up when he saw me walking toward him, his face collapsing into a mixture of relief and shame all at once. I will not try to describe exactly what I felt in those minutes. There are discoveries that language cannot accurately capture. I had suspected an affair for over a year.
To suspect something, and to stand on a sidewalk while its evidence rises twenty-two stories above you in the form of flashing lights, are not the same experience. They do not even come close to being the same experience. Detective Morse came to speak with me. He was a precise, measured man.
He told me that a woman in the building had been taken to the hospital after eating food that appeared to be contaminated, that the food had been delivered by a driver who worked for my husband, and that there was a handwritten note he needed me to examine. He showed me a photo on his phone. Thinking of you today. Eat every bite, my love.
I stood on a sidewalk in Chicago in October with the lake wind picking up, looking at my husband’s handwriting on a business card, and I understood then the full truth of what I was seeing. I knew the pen. The backward slant of the capital S. The way he pressed hard on the vertical lines.
Eight years of grocery lists and birthday cards, I knew every curve of that handwriting as well as I knew my own. I said, That’s his handwriting. I told Detective Morse everything. The morning anxiety.
The coffee Randall had not touched. The tie he adjusted when he was nervous. The fact that he had mentioned no delivery to me because there had been no delivery coming to me. I told him what I knew about the affair, about a year of shifting patterns and coldness and distance.
Bruno gave his statement separately. He explained the instructions. Take it home, to the one who is always waiting. And he explained how nine years of watching a man’s habits had led him to River North without a single moment of hesitation.
He was crying as he told them. The detective said he kept repeating that he thought he was following instructions correctly, that he was trying to do his job well. In a twisted and horrible way, he had done exactly that. Randall arrived at the scene forty minutes later.
He came around the corner in his tailored suit, his face arranged with great precision, like a man who had rehearsed a certain expression. A version of grief, or confusion, as a husband hearing terrible news for the first time. He came around the corner and saw me. Everything he had prepared to say left his body completely.
I looked at him the way you look at something you spent a long time refusing to see. Not with anger. Not with the hysteria he might have expected and planned for. With clarity.
The flat, unobstructed kind of clarity that only comes when every excuse has burned away and you are finally able to see the person as he is. He looked smaller than I remembered. He looked tired. He looked like a man who had crafted an elaborate plan and only now realized what it revealed about him.
He said, Lauren. I did not answer. Detective Morse stepped forward and read him his rights on the sidewalk while the lake wind moved through all of us. Randall kept looking at me the whole time.
Even as they led him to the police car, he kept his eyes on my face. As if eight years of tolerating him meant I might find a way to make this disappear. As if my forgiveness had no limits. It wasn’t supposed to be you, he said.
It was the most honest sentence he had spoken to me in years. It was not a confession. It was not an apology. It was an explanation of a logistical error.
I turned my face away. Bruno was still sitting on the concrete wall near the building entrance, his cap in his hands. I sat down beside him. He was a man who had given nearly a decade of loyalty to someone who used him as a tool without his knowledge.
And here he was, sitting outside the crime scene, wondering whether the consequences of following instructions belonged on his conscience. You didn’t know, I told him. He shook his head. Look at me, Bruno.
You followed what you understood. You couldn’t have known. This is not a weight you have to carry. He cried silently, the way people cry when they have been holding something in for far too long.
I stayed beside him until the detectives finished, until he had somewhere to go. The question that has come to me often since that day is: what would have happened if I had stayed home? If I had not been fasting? If the dental cleaning had not left my jaw too sore for solid food?
If I had not kept that Tuesday afternoon commitment at the outreach center? Those children waiting for school supplies, and that pull I always felt in the weeks when the house felt too empty and the silence too loud. I do not believe any of it was coincidence. I am not someone who uses the word miracle lightly.
But I believe that a life built on prayer and fasting, and on showing up for other people, builds something into the structure of your days that you cannot always see while you are inside it. I prayed every morning for Randall’s protection, for his safety, for whatever goodness remained in him to rise to the surface. Those prayers did not save his soul. But I believe they saved mine.
I believe the discipline itself, the discipline that got me out of that house on a Tuesday afternoon, that kept me fasting and moving and useful to someone, built something around me that a carefully poisoned soup could not reach. Maybe that is the story I tell myself to make sense of something senseless. Maybe. But I stood on the far side of what was meant to end my life, and I decided that the only thing worth doing with that truth was to keep showing up.
Randall was convicted of first-degree murder fourteen months later. His lawyers argued delivery error, lack of intent toward Tabitha specifically, a chain of misunderstandings. The jury was not convinced. The handwritten note helped prove intent.
The syringe found in his bag helped more. The testimony of the vendor the FBI located through Randall’s financial records was what finally sealed it. He is serving his sentence at a facility outside the city. I have not visited him.
I have not written him a single word. I filed for divorce before the trial ended, and the settlement recognized the inheritance for what it had always been. The house is mine. The accounts are mine.
The life I am building going forward is entirely my own. I still go to the outreach center every Tuesday. I still fast. I still pray in the morning, though what I say has turned into something quieter and less noisy than it used to be.
I no longer pray for Randall. That chapter is over, and I have closed it cleanly. What I pray for now is simpler. Clarity.
The courage to see people as they are rather than as I need them to be. The wisdom to leave early when I find myself making excuses to stay in a place that is slowly taking something from me. And I pray for Bruno Castillo, who found a new driving job with a small family company in Evanston, and who messages me every birthday. Just three words each year.
Hope you’re well. I always reply the same way. I’m well, thank you. On the morning my husband tried to kill me, I was kneeling in our bedroom asking God to protect him.
God looked at both of us and chose to protect me instead. I have spent a long time reflecting on that, and I have come to believe that sometimes the most loving answers a prayer receives are the ones that look nothing like what we asked for, but exactly like everything we truly needed.