When she first came here, she couldn’t sleep. She lay night after night on top of her bed, sweating and shaking, wracked with sobs, nausea and intense itching. They anticipated this with new arrivals and after dinner, one of the staff members gave her a fistful of pills to take, but she didn’t take them; she kept them for a moment in the wet pocket of her cheek until she could spit them out. Nobody checked; Villa Vinternatt isn’t that kind of place. She did take the methadone, but it took several weeks before she began to feel better, and several more before Elisabeth started to feel at home. But she still can’t sleep.

This is a place to grow and to reconnect, they said when Elisabeth was first introduced to the idea of Villa Vinternatt. A rehabilitation center for artists with addiction issues, which offered progressive treatment for substance abuse, using a combination of methadone, intense group therapy and a chance to contribute to the arts, supposedly giving recovering addicts a sense of purpose and community. Some stay for a few months, some for years, all government funded. Many people want the opportunity to come somewhere like this, Kristina had said, and Elisabeth knew she was lucky. She hadn’t had much luck in the years before coming to Villa Vinternatt.

For years, Elisabeth had sold herself for heroin. And if you have sold yourself, what, if anything, of yourself remains yours? She was there, in the little yellow room in the eaves, a woman without doubt. A tired and thin and pale one, but definitely a female human. There were brittle bones and broken veins and some patches of permanently bruised skin and a sweet, youthful face almost untouched by the horrors she’d lived. In her veins rushed blood, and she was often preoccupied with blood; it was in her therapy notes, and it was in her art – repeat mentions of blood, as if it was the source of everything that had happened. Hungry blood, bad blood, blood that needed something injected into its flow to give her body and mind what it craved: she had tried many analogies over the years to describe the notion that what drove her came from her very core, it ran through her veins. But was it always there?