“What are you doing?” He stood, but his legs shook. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t think. Life leaked out of him. Was he dying? Was he mad? He tried to push past Thornhill, but the man was like an ox, blocking his way and strong-arming him back. “I don’t need confinement—I need the truth!”

“The truth, Dr. Turner, is that you are no more sane than your patients. I had the papers drawn up shortly after her death, after your outbursts, and you are in fact a legal patient here.”

He sprang up, lunging for the door. “No!”

Thornhill stabbed a needle into Turner’s flesh, and in a panic, Turner knocked it away. Cool liquid dropped on his skin and heat radiated from the injection site. Nausea swept through him in long, pulling waves. Dahlia. She died this way. With an injection that was too much.

He felt the bed beneath him, and he could picture it still—her white arm hanging off the edge. Her hair and pale skin. Images shuddered through him, pounding against his brain as caged animals desperate for release.

His moist fingers swept his hair off his forehead. It was as if he was happening upon her all over again.

“No one blames you, Turner. No one. But this is best for now. I’m afraid her death has broken you.”

“No.” Moisture gathered along his shaking limbs. “No!” A hole had been pierced in his lungs, and air was leaking out. This couldn’t be his story. His reality. Wife dead, neglected and alone, and now him dead, or locked in an asylum. And not as a doctor. Not truly.

Then the door slammed shut.

But not before he weakly tossed the edge of his coat in the latch.

It was dark. Night. Turner’s head still swam with the lingering effects of the injection, but the cool air of an abandoned corridor helped dissipate it. A good portion of the dose must have landed on his shirt and arm when he’d knocked it away, because he was recovering more quickly than he’d expected.

Quickly enough, he hoped, to be able to do what was necessary. He shook his head to clear it and waved on the man behind him. “Come quickly.”

He urged John Michelson—Philippe—out into the dimly lit corridor, an arm about his hunched back. He was liable to be caught by Thornhill at any moment, but suddenly Mitchell didn’t care. Something had broken within him—something set free, perhaps. This had been no place for Dahlia, and it was no place for anyone who had any other option in the world. Rather than repairing the broken people who came to it, Hurstwell itself was broken.