She shrugged. “I stare at the paneling in our ward. Isn’t much else to look at when you can’t sleep. The paneling was all fifteen inches by fifteen inches except that one—it was thirteen and a half by fifteen. Not quite square. Anything that doesn’t fit the pattern is special.”

I looked over her bright face, closed up here at Hurstwell like a candle in a closet. “How very true that is.” I shifted on the rough wooden seat. “How is it that you all know about these tunnels and the staff does not?”

Bridget leaned her head back and closed her eyes again. “Because they’ve never looked. They come and go as they please. But we are left to claw at every space and wall for a moment of relief from our lives.”

“You’ve given me that tonight, you know. Relief.”

She angled her face toward me, smiling and leaning back on her elbows. “So’ve you.”

“I’ve given you nothing but extra trouble. I saw what you did for me that day in the laundry.”

She blew hair off her face, thoughtful for a moment. “I’m broken inside, like a clock missing a single gear, and nobody lets me forget it. But you look at me like I was a whole person already. Even if I never get fixed.”

“You’re not broken—just put together differently.” I looked at her troubled face. “Who else would have seen patterns in the panels? If not for you, I’d be suffering miserably, one wall away from the most beautiful instrument I’ve ever seen, never knowing it was here.”

She flashed a half smile my way, then dropped her gaze. “Also had bouts of melancholia.”

I stared at this woman, trying to wrap such a word around her being.

“Dodged it off and on me whole life, but once I had me that babby I always wanted, one of me own, I couldn’t move fast enough to dodge the wave. Socked me like a load of feed.” She shifted under the weight of what she’d silently carried for so long.

“What’s it like? Having melancholia, I mean.”

She stared at the floor. “Heard talk of the seaside once. It’s something like that—a wave that sucks you down, then eventually it lets you up again. Doesn’t matter what you believe about the Almighty or anything else. You can’t climb out. No one can pull you out. Just has to roll over you till it passes, then you stand up and keep going. Until the next one. Then, one day when me body felt better, that wave wouldn’t let me up. Just set right here on me chest and stayed.”

“Couldn’t you remind yourself of all the times the wave has passed? Look forward to what was to come?”