It was real. I was locked in—and that realization brought the sinking despair of powerlessness and hopelessness. Say Laura wanted me dead—all she really had to do was just not come back, right? Sure, I had a little bit of water. But eventually you die, even with water.

I paced around in circles for a while before deciding to try to preserve my energy, in case I got the chance to fight back.

The one bright spot was that, while I was completely tired and my throat was desperately sore, the rest of my body felt almost normal. I was hungry and thirsty, but I didn’t feel the nausea or dizziness that had been hanging over me for four days.

This seemed to indicate, obviously, that Laura had drugged me. And with the recurrence of my nightmares came the realization that she had been drugging my nighttime tea all along. Now that I knew for sure what it felt like to wake up with chemicals pulsing through your body, I recognized it—that sleepy-strange dizziness, the unfocused confusion.

Her system was bound to fail sometime. All she’d been trying to do was get me to behave, and look where that had gotten us. I’d been miserably pondering the idea that I might have been okay at Copeland Hall if I had just minded my own business and been a better orphan. But there was no such thing as being a good-enough orphan for Laura. Not even her own daughter could meet her impossible standards. Not even her own sister.

The day wore on, and I did what I could to fight off the hunger and a bleached kind of boredom that left the stage wide open for every worst-case scenario to run on infinite repeat in my head. I was coping all right, I told myself. Could be worse. Could be worse.

At one point, I found Kiley’s phone unexpectedly tucked into my pocket, and while there was no signal, I had to maintain hope that I might eventually get to one. But when I switched it on, I found it only half charged, so I quickly shut it off again and hid it in the desk drawer.

Laura left me alone until the sun began to slide down toward the hills, at which point she knocked lightly and came in, pausing by the door. “Just so you know,” she said, “every entrance and exit in the house is locked. You might find a way out . . . but you might not. So if you hurt me in any way, you’re endangering Agatha, who’s currently very well secured behind a door only I can open. Understood?”

I nodded.