I press my lips together, lips that would feel better with lipstick, but there is no lipstick in this place. No nail polish. It’s all about pale here, washed-out walls, dull carpets. Boring colours that don’t tell you anything. You can’t trust beige.

It will take a long time to move past all of this, everything that has happened, the way they are treating me in here. My father says I’ll need a lot of counselling. He says the police say I did it, but my lawyer is going to demand that I be released once they give Sergei’s statement to the court, saying that he was the one. My lawyer’s going to tell the judge I have post-traumatic stress disorder from watching Sergei murder that girl. PTSD. It sounds like the name of a band.

The door opens. The warden is old, almost fifty, I bet, older than my dad. There is no kindness in his blue eyes. There’s something else in there, but I haven’t figured out what it is yet. I will. But he’s got a shield up. He’s seen it all, he tells me whenever he meets with me.

They act like everyone in here is guilty, even me, on remand, with no trial yet. The warden says he knows I’m afraid, it’s normal, but I need to show respect. I can’t yell at the staff. I can’t throw things. It doesn’t matter how angry I get, how upset; there are appropriate ways to behave, and I’ll be in here for a lot longer if I don’t behave.

“Even if they’re rude to me?” I ask him. “If they don’t show me respect?”

“Expecting you to do what they say, when they say it, isn’t rude,” he says.

“You don’t know what it’s like to be locked up.”

“No,” he says, “I don’t. You should have thought of that before.”

“But I didn’t do anything,” I tell him.

The warden nods. “Yes, so you say.”

I look away. He doesn’t care that I’m a victim too. He thinks because my father is a politician I feel entitled to special treatment. I don’t.

“They’ll be here for you soon,” he says. Maybe my father isn’t coming back. I don’t even bother asking. I won’t give him the satisfaction of knowing I want to know what’s going on. He leaves and I look at the door as he walks out.

Click.

The sharp sound of the door locking fills the cell and then fades into a dream sound, a muffled, faraway echoing.

Click, click.

My mother used to tap her shoe when she wanted something done. She’ll have been gone for three years this spring, and I can still hear the click her high heels made on the ceramic tile.

Click when the door closed behind her. The click the phone made when she’d hang up when we’d have our weekly call after she left and moved. She always said she had to hang up before I was ready to stop talking. Then I would hear the sound of the call ending.