Chapter 2
ASHLEY
Heath: Tell me I’m not the only one thinking Nate is being Shady McLiar-Pants about what happened at his party. Am I imagining things or is he being suspicious as fuck?
Royce: My thoughts exactly.
Carter: What the fuck could he be hiding? He admitted they argued. Why not tell us the rest? Spark could be in real danger, and he’s worried he’ll come off like an asshole?
Carly: News flash, he already is an asshole. Fuck him, we’ll rescue her ourselves, right team?
…
…
…
Carter: who added Carly to the chat group?
Carly:
C ommitted. Nate had me fucking committed to an honest-to-fuck mental health facility…and the longer I spent awake in these sterile white rooms with the gray assortment of other barely sentient patients, the more I wondered if maybe he’d been right to do so.
At least a dozen conversations with my primary physician had me doubting everything.
According to them, I’d suffered a mental breakdown after Heath’s suicide, and it’d all gone downhill from there.
According to them, I was one false step away from a straitjacket and padded room.
I needed to mind my words and actions, or things would get a lot worse.
If that were even possible. Heath was dead? Mom was dead? My relationships were all merely figments of my drug-addled imagination? If that was all true, then what the fuck was I even living for?
My belief in what I knew versus what they told me flip-flopped almost hourly. It was exhausting.
“Would you like to go for a walk in the garden, Miss Ashley?” one of the kinder nurses asked in a gentle voice. I’d just been given my medication—no clue what it was—and had swallowed it obediently. I’d learned the hard way on day one that refusal wasn’t an option.
To my surprise, though, the little white pills did nothing to me. I felt no different taking them, which only leaned into the idea that I was, in fact, totally insane.
“Sure,” I agreed, for lack of anything better to do. It’d been a week…I was pretty sure it’d been a week. Maybe more? I was hazy on those first few days when all I did was cry and scream. Now I was calmer.
Nurse Annette smiled her sunny smile, gesturing for me to walk beside her as we headed down the hall past the common room. I fucking hated going into the common room, where half the patients were talking to ghosts and the other half were just drooling statues.
“How are you feeling today?” she asked as we walked. “You seem calm.”
“I am,” I murmured, knowing that anything less would lead to them upping my sedation. I’d seen it every damn day in other patients and experienced it a few times myself. Sedation was awful . “Has the doctor gotten in contact with my stepbrother yet?”
Not calling them by name kept me from spitting when I said the doctor’s name or Nate’s.
The one tiny shred of hope I was clinging to was that I hadn’t seen Nate. I hadn’t heard the awful news about Heath, my mom, his dad, my sanity …all from his mouth. If he could look me in the fucking eye and tell me it was all true, then I’d have no choice but to believe it.
Until then…
“I’m sorry, Ashley,” Nurse Annette sighed. “I was told your brother is unavailable to visit at the moment. Maybe we can try again next week?”
I swallowed hard, despite already knowing that would have been the answer. “Maybe.”
The nurse shot me a concerned look, her lips pursed thoughtfully. She wasn’t much older than me and had told me she’d only started at this hospital a month ago. “Do you want me to sit with you for a bit?”
I almost accepted, only because speaking with her was overwhelmingly more appealing than being approached by another “guest” and engaging in a conversation about how aliens live among us. But then I spotted a brunette woman sitting by the duck pond in her wheelchair. Alone.
“No, thank you. I’m just going to enjoy the sunshine.”
“Okay, I’ll check back on you in a bit, then.” Nurse Annette shot me another troubled look, then sighed and headed back inside.
I paused a little, pretending to admire the thornless roses growing beside the path, giving it a moment to be sure that the nurse had left me alone and not changed her mind. After a beat, I glanced over my shoulder to confirm the door was closed, then casually made my way over to the duck pond.
“Hello,” I said in a gentle voice as I approached the woman in the wheelchair. At a distance, I’d have said she was in her late thirties, but now that I was closer, I could see she was much younger. Mid-twenties, maybe? Insanity must take a toll on a person’s youthfulness.
The woman didn’t respond. She just stared blankly out at the pond, where a little family of ducks swam leisurely across the surface. There was no focus to her gaze, though. She could just as easily have been blind, for all I could tell.
“Um, I’m Ashley,” I tried again, kneeling on the grass beside her wheelchair. “What’s your name?”
Silence. Not even a flicker of acknowledgment. If not for the fact I’d seen her writing in her diary several times, I’d think she was totally catatonic. The diary in question was in her lap, her fingers curled around it like she was terrified someone would take it away.
I bit my lip, undecided on what to do next.
I wanted to know more about this woman because every time I’d spotted Jocelyn—or Dr. Russo—she’d been wholly engrossed in speaking with this woman.
Who couldn’t speak back. So either I was crazy, Dr. Russo was actually not Nate’s psychotic mother, and I really did belong here…
or this dead-eyed woman knew what the fuck was really going on.
“So, um, you like writing? Is it fiction?” I was grasping at straws, but shit, she was giving me nothing to work with. “Or, uh, non-fiction?”
What the fuck, Ashley? You sound like a moron.
Luckily, the woman didn’t notice. Or if she did, she made no reaction.
Something was scratching at my brain, though, and I desperately wanted to know what this otherwise catatonic patient was so often writing in her diary. And why Jocelyn was so invested.
For a minute I just knelt there, trying to work out what the hell to do next.
She was totally unresponsive. Would she notice if I just…
took a little peek at her writing? Maybe I was totally off-base and it was just scribbles.
Maybe it was the rantings of a truly mad woman.
Maybe…maybe…it was a smoking gun for Jocelyn’s fucked-up hypnosis experiment?
Wishful thinking, surely. But I had nowhere else to be and nothing else to do, so what the heck?
Drawing a breath, I reached out and tapped my fingertip on the leatherbound book in her lap.
“This feels rude, but do you mind if I just…take a little peek at what you’re writing?
” I paused, uncomfortable as hell. Then I puffed a sigh and grasped the book between my fingers and started to slip it out from beneath her hands.
It was such an invasion of privacy, but if nothing else, I could claim insanity. Right?
All of a sudden, the vacant-eyed woman snapped to life, her fingers curling around the book as she jerked it out of my delicate grip.
“Don’t!” she snapped, her eyes locking on mine with startling clarity as she clutched the book to her chest. “They’ll kill you.”
Shock saw me reeling back, falling on my butt on the grass. “Wh-what? Who? Why?”
The woman just stared at me. Through me. Then her eyes lost focus again, and she relaxed back into her chair, shoulders curling once more as she retreated inside her own head. It was almost like I could see my last shred of hope fading before my eyes, and panic jolted me out of my shock.
Launching forward, I grasped her shoulders to try and shake her back into consciousness. “What do you mean? Who will kill me? Why?”
Her gaze flickered, like she was drunk, then she muttered something under her breath I couldn’t make out. Across the garden, the door to the main building opened and a familiar, elegant woman stepped out, causing a gut-wrenching twist of fear to grasp my insides.
“What?” I repeated, frantic now. “What did you say?”
She mumbled it again, and this time I thought I heard her a little better…but it didn’t make any sense. I was out of time, though.
“Ashley.” The cool voice made my shoulders stiffen and my lungs tighten. “What are you doing out here?”
I practically fell over my own feet trying to stand and put distance between myself and the woman of my literal nightmares. “Just enjoying the sunshine,” I replied, backing away hastily.
Since that first day when I’d screamed about her being Jocelyn, I hadn’t interacted much with Dr. Russo, despite seeing her around the hospital. Even more uncomfortable still, I’d seen Dr. Fox around the hospital too.
That acknowledgment made me feel ill every time it entered my head. That I’d somehow fabricated his murder in my mind? It was fucked-up.
As I hurried away from Dr. Evil and her wheelchair-bound patient, I caught her greeting carried on the breeze. “Good morning, Abby. How are you doing today?”
I stumbled.
Abby?
Holy fuck. No.
Suddenly, the mumbled response the vacant woman had given me made sense, and the knowledge rang like a fucking bell inside my head, loud enough to deafen me.
The ducks .
Ducks.
Devil’s Backbone Society.
Holy fuck, had I just met Abigail?
Shocked, I turned back in the direction I’d come, but the doctor was wheeling her away with a brisk pace. Somehow Dr. Russo seemed to sense I was watching, though, and glanced back my way. Our eyes locked, and cold fear ran through me at the little smile that curved her perfect lips.
How the fuck was this possible?
Or was it?
I shook my head, blinking against the sunlight and questioning fucking everything. Including my sanity.