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Jelly legged, I hang limply between the two porters, they’re big hands clammy and cold. It sends a shiver up my bare spine, a paper-thin medical gown tied in the back, exposing me to the elements of a place I never wanted to come back to again.
Dr Soren is smug, I can tell, even from only being able to see the back of his head as we follow him down the endless bright white corridors. He’s whistling, the echo of it like thunder down the long, wide space. Paired with the rain above, it feels like an unending darkness is finally settling in. Something I’m not going to be able to shift.
What if I never get out of here?
A sob is locked behind my teeth, and everything inside of me feels so dried out already, I don’t think I could cry if I wanted to. Which I don’t. I’m not giving these people my tears. Not anymore. I have cried too much over things thatactuallymatter. People who, despite everything, love me.
I know they do.
I know I love them.
I think of Rex’s face back in the dean’s office, his promise.
‘We will always find you.’
And I shiver for an entirely different reason now.
Dr Soren stops before a familiar steel door, only four rooms on this entire top floor.
Solitary.
‘It helps clear your head, Poppy.’
That’s what he told me when I was first brought here all those months ago. And each time I’ve been back since, he’s said something similar.
Now he just pushes open the door, the porters dragging me inside the space, empty except for a single bed.
Without fight, I let them shove me down on the cot, no sheets, no pillows, nothing I could attempt to damage myself with. Leather cuffs are quickly fastened around my wrists and ankles. Bands buckled over my thighs, belly and chest. I am limp, so still it feels like I am dying. I can hardly taste my own breath, my chest such a slow rise and fall, you could likely mistake me for a corpse.
I am dying and I just found life.
They broke me.
They’re rebuilding me.
We’re fixing things.
They’re still showing me how sorry they are.
This can’t be how it ends for us.
Not after everything.
“Welcome home, Poppy,” Dr Soren calls from the doorway, a taunting, evil smile revealed in his voice. “It’s so wonderful to have you back. Sleep well, we’ve got a lot to catch up on in our sessions.”
Flicking out the light, he plunges me into my own personal hell.
That’s when I start to scream.
“Poppy.”
Stuck somewhere between conscious and not, I feel like I’m floating, like I’m falling. As though I am both very heavy and very light, a boulder and a feather.
“Miss Foster.”
Frowning, my eyes glued together with sleep, I try to peel my lids open, squeezing my eyes shut tighter, fluttering my lashes. I reach up, scrubbing my knuckles over my eyes. A pinch of pain in my wrists as I press them to my face has me gasping. Eyes flying open as I remember where I am.
But my hands are free of their cuffs, there’s feeling back in my toes. I shiver with the cold, finally dragging my eyes open just enough to squint. There’s too much light in the room, the bulb overhead flooding the oversized, clinical white space with a bright, almost blue, hue, forcing my eyes to squeeze closed again.
