I was fully aware as I stood naked and shivering on the floor a moment later that I had nothing, not even a scrap of my own clothing. Barely an identity and, after what seemed like several rounds of sedatives in that cell, a delicate grasp on reality. I grabbed for the towel, and my head swam, half-formed thoughts skittering through my swampy mind. I knew only one thing, and I clung to it with the tenacity of one going under. I have to escape.

I perched with wet hair on a hard, straight-backed bench in the dayroom with icy water trailing down my back and scanned for a cracked-open window, a door ajar, a hole in the system through which I could slip, but there was nothing. My fleeting attention turned to the patients, these yellow gowns who needed extra monitoring, but my heart sank. They sat wilted to chairs and benches with vacant stares, hope deflated from their bodies. These were the ones not even fit to work. Bodies lived there, but spirits had decayed inside. There would be no help from them.

Nurse Branson set paper, pen, and inkwell before me. “You are lucid?”

I nodded.

“Can you read and write?”

I fisted my hands on my lap and kept my voice even. “Of course.”

“Copy the line at the top until the page is full.” She had the air of a mother, but one whose maternal nature had dried out. My heart urged me to appeal to her, get her to look at me and see something worth nurturing, but she turned her back and left.

I am not a concert pianist was scrawled across the top of the page. I dangled the pen above the page until a splotch of ink dropped onto it. I was being restrung, the way pianofortes were when the old strings grew brittle and weak. Every morning and evening, I was placed in the dayroom with a paper and ink and asked to write out some statement, and thus release my grip on truth. I numbed my mind against the words and wrote and wrote, until those evil lines swam before my eyes. I drank the tea every night, swallowed pills in the morning, and moved through life, doing what I was told.

I prayed lavishly in those days with each breath in and out, begging, pleading with God in half-formed sentences and scattered utterances. The strong, silent presence of the Almighty, which I had often felt beside me like the warm glow of a hearth, had brought me through the years with Father, but I’d always had my music then too. This prison was stripped of music. My life had been interrupted—stolen from me—and now there was nothing. Only silence.

But then . . . there was Richard.

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