Oh heavens. I pushed up onto all fours, stomach lurching with such force. I lunged for the chamber pot and missed, emptying my stomach onto the floor.

I used to look at the other patients around me and feel out of place, starkly different amidst unstable insanity. But now I could taste the anger, the metallic desperation I saw in some of their faces. How delicate the line was between sanity and madness. The longer I existed in these gray halls, the less confident I was of which side I belonged on.

This place was wrong, all wrong. One set of footsteps retreated, Thornhill’s staccato limp echoing down the hall, and a sudden panic gripped me. The file. The patient file on Thornhill. I had to tell someone. Had to get help. I was being held by a madman. I rose up and banged on the door. “Dr. Turner!” Bang, bang. He’d believe me. He would. “Help!” Bang, bang, bang.

The door jerked open, knocking me back, but it was Nurse Duffy who squeezed in, hand in her apron pocket. In a flash I wondered if she too had been a patient here. I flew at the cracked-open door, and she slammed it shut, grabbing my arm and twisting it behind me. Pain jolted with surprising intensity. “A right sore spot of trouble you are.” A stab in my thigh and a coolness spread through my leg. “Learn to keep quiet,” she hissed, and her face was bleary. Underwater. “And things will go better for you.”

I pictured Rosamond’s smiling face as the injection dulled my senses, forcing the dreamy image of her into clarity. Re-creating that lovely calm I always had when I saw her. White and airy. Beautiful.

Long dead. They’d said that. About her. A woman long dead is who I’d seen.

But she wasn’t. She played. She smiled. Roses and music.

I lifted higher, weightless, off the ground and peaceful. Detached.

Rosamond. I always felt her playing before I heard it, vibrating the furniture beneath me. It was the same song, that ghostly rhapsody easing from major to minor, seeping through the walls to find me in my quiet little chamber in the east wing, and I swam in it. Lay in the cushioned feel of it.

I rose in silken movements, letting the music soak through the soles of my feet, and padded toward my wrapper. I was nine again, my delight unpolluted by adult wisdom. I knew the way by now, down the stairs and through the gallery to the rose room just below, where my mother’s great Collard & Collard lay exposed to the moonlight that fell through long windows, the dustcover drawn back so the visitor could play.