“My hands are . . .” Linda glanced down, visualizing her hands as she saw them in the memory. “They’re not so tanned as they are now. My fingernails are manicured and painted. So I must have been fourteen or fifteen.”

Slowly, Dr. Kirkland repeated back, “She tidied up the counter. Threw stuff away, that sort of thing.”

“Yes, that’s right.” Linda closed her eyes against the rising pain of the headache. “She tossed out the take-out containers and the yeast packet, then turned—Oh! God.”

She saw it then, the red, blue and yellow packet. Saw her mother tear it open and sprinkle most of the contents over Linda’s favorite Chinese take-out.

Pressing both hands over her mouth, Linda relived the bloating, the pressure, the urge to vomit. Sweat prickled in a hot flush all over her body. The next thought, even worse, struck across her mind like a lightning bolt: it hadn’t been the first time.

Dr. Kirkland was already on her feet, quickly stuffing the wastebasket between Linda’s knees even as she wrapped one arm around Linda’s shoulders, saying intensely, “I’m so sorry. So very sorry. It makes me so angry that she did that to you. It’s okay. You’re not there. It’s okay.”

Linda gulped for air through her hands and swallowed down the burning of bile. Never again. She remembered now. She remembered everything and she wouldn’t get sick again.

The light in the office had changed by the time she was able to sip some water and breathe more normally.

“It was the first time I saw her do it but then I realized she’d been doing it for years. Every time I lost a pageant I got sick, really sick. I threw up for days. She’d get all this great food for me to tempt my appetite, she said. She took me to doctors, who were mystified. She told pageant people that I’d obviously had food poisoning the night of the competition or else I’d have never lost.”

“So you saw her put the yeast on your food?”

“And she told me to clean my plate.” Linda swallowed hard. “I took the plate from her and she said a good meal would make me beautiful.”

“How long after that time that you saw her did you attempt suicide?”

“Probably a week, maybe a little more. The attacks lasted at least that long and I couldn’t keep anything down. I kept the pills down.” She’d never been sure whether her failure to lock the bathroom door had been an oversight or if she’d really not meant to be successful. Not that the difference mattered to the fallout.

“And she had you committed.”

A white-hot bolt of anger split Linda’s head in two. “She threw me away into that place because I was her loser daughter. I couldn’t win a tiara and she couldn’t present me to the world like a prize pet she’d groomed to champion status.”

The migraine blossomed into a full aura of red as she finally broke down into wracking sobs. “That’s what she did. She made me sick. I can’t tell Marissa. I haven’t called her. She’ll hate me. She couldn’t understand.”