Before long, the shaking had been replaced by a feeling of being utterly warm and secure. I was so relaxed that when Mrs. Sutton came in, I smiled at her. She smiled back at me and forced another pill down my throat.

“Good girl,” she said indulgently, ruffling my hair like I was a dog.

I WAS AWAKE . . . I guess.

I tried to close my eyes, but doing that actually took more effort than looking. I didn’t look at anything—well, nothing that would have appealed to the old me. But the new me was calmer, easier to please. New me found a small dark spot on a ceiling tile and kept a very close eye on it.

Laura came in. She shone a light into my eyes and spoke to me, but her words were muffled, like my ears were full of cotton.

She helped me sit up in the bed, and sitting was easy. Anything was easy when you were just doing that one thing. It was when you tried to change what you were doing, or combine it with something else—thinking, for instance—that it got hard.

“I think we have the dosage just right,” she said. Then she began to feed me tiny bites of food. Which was fine. I may have been hungry at some point, but now I didn’t care. I drank some water. At her urging, I got up and used the toilet. Then I got back into bed. “This is lovely, Margot. Don’t you feel peaceful? It’s going to be so easy for you to be a good girl now. You’ll see.”

Yes, easy. It was so easy.

“Here you go,” she said, sliding a pill onto my tongue and chasing it with some water. “Sleep well.”

No dreams that night. Only darkness.

CHAPTER

30

SHE CAME BACK later, humming cheerfully, and slipped another pill into my mouth. Then she fed me small bites of plain chicken and helped me use the toilet.

“Oof.” She stood back and sighed. “You need a shower. Can’t you smell yourself?”

A short time later, she told me to get up off the bed. The lack of politeness didn’t bother me—it was much easier to understand direct orders. With her hand on my arm, we shuffled down the hall to the main upstairs hallway. We went into the larger bathroom, and I sat down on the chair in the shower while she washed my hair and sprayed my body down.

Just like she did with Agatha. I was just like Agatha now.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know what was happening . . .

It was that I didn’t care.

Afterward, she took me back to the sickroom and put a pair of pajamas on me.

“Tomorrow,” she said, “we’ll get you dressed in the morning—the way I do with Agatha.”

Okay, I tried to say, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate.