24. Liath
LIATH
The art therapy room was too quiet.
Every scratch of charcoal or murmur of voices seemed to disappear up into the high, ornate ceilings.
Tall, arched windows lined one side, their panes casting thin light across walls painted in panels of deep hospital green and tired white, colors chosen to calm the eye while the sharp smell of disinfectant and poster paint clung stubbornly to the air.
A few nurses hovered at the edges, their voices soft and encouraging, their hands busy with clipboards.
Patients sat scattered at tables, shoulders hunched over paper, fingers stained with charcoal and tempera.
I sat in my seat, my gaze unfocused, hands moving absentmindedly.
The sensation of being watched crawled over my skin, and my shoulders tightened.
But there was no buzzing behind my eyes. No split-second tilt of the world. No sudden crack in the air that made my thoughts feel like they were being rearranged under someone’s hands.
The silence inside my skull felt wrong, like a missing tooth my tongue kept returning to.
Nurse Murphy paused behind me. “That’s a pretty one.”
My hand hesitated over the page and the end of my pencil snapped off, leaving a darker mark than I meant. I tipped my chin up. “What?”
“The song ye were humming.”
The humming died in my throat mid-note. My skin prickled. I hadn’t realized I’d been doing that.
“‘The Parting Glass,’” Murphy continued. “So sad.”
Heat flooded my neck, sudden and humiliating, as if I’d been caught doing something private.
“Yes. Right. I guess I must have… heard it somewhere,” I said, but my voice sounded thin even to me.
Murphy’s mouth softened. “My da played it on his fiddle at my ma’s funeral.”
Murphy moved on. But I was still stuck on that tune.
It kept circling in my head, and I tried to place where I knew it from. Nothing came, not a clear memory, not a moment I could grab. There was only a pull in my chest. Like a story I’d been told so many times I’d started to believe it was mine.
I realized charcoal stained the fingers of my right hand.
Had I been drawing? But I don’t draw.
I frowned and dropped my gaze to the paper under my fingers.
Dark hair. Sharp cheekbones. Eyes that watched me back.
My stomach tightened.
I scrunched the top sheet of paper, the sharp crinkle startlingly loud in the hushed room, causing several heads to turn. Someone paused mid-brushstroke and Nurse Helena peered over with a frown.
A laugh jumped out of me, forced and wrong. “I smudged it,” I said, and my voice sounded airy like I didn’t care.
My pulse climbed anyway, hard enough to make my fingers tremble when I saw the papers underneath.
I spread them out, my fingers trembling. The same face stared back at me from every sheet in slight variations. The same dark gaze. The same angles. The same dangerous presence.
My throat went dry.
The chair legs scraped, and then suddenly Bláthnaid, Fiona, and Dervla surrounded me before I understood why.
I shoved all the drawings underneath my pad as quickly as I could, hands clumsy with panic.
They started singing “Happy Birthday,” off-key and too loud.
The sound ricocheted off the walls and my face heated, the flush crawling up my neck and over my cheeks. But I kept my smile in place because it was easier than asking them to stop.
When the song ended, a couple of other patients clapped.
Bláthnaid thrust a cupcake onto the table in front of me, the frosting a glossy chocolate swirl.
Fiona lifted her shoulders in a theatrical shrug. “They wouldn’t let us have a candle. Fire and loonies don’t mix, wouldn’t ye know.”
The joke landed flat in my chest.
Dervla swiped a bit of frosting, then sucked it off her finger. She made a face like she’d tasted medicine. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s carob.”
Right. ’Cause chocolate was forbidden. Too “stimulating.”
“We won’t be insulted if ye don’t eat it,” Dervla said.
“I will.” Bláthnaid straightened the paper wrapper around the base of the cupcake before letting go of it. “I made it. Well, Chef let me supervise while he made it because apparently, I’m not trusted with whisks anymore.”
I laughed. “You’re early, you eejits.”
Bláthnaid blinked. “What? No. I checked with reception. Today is your birthday.”
I held the cupcake like it might explode. “My birthday is next month.”
Fiona frowned, her forehead creasing like the math didn’t fit. “Aren’t you beginning of August? A Leo baby?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
Dervla blinked slowly, her gaze pinning me. “It is August.”
A pause opened up between us.
Bláthnaid snorted. “Jesus, Rua, did you sleep through July or what?”
My brain tried to rearrange the math.
I calculated when I woke up here, tried to count subsequent months like they were beads on a string.
It didn’t fit.
Fiona, Bláthnaid, and Dervla, their eyes were all on me, waiting, smiling, offering, and the attention pressed in until my skin prickled.
Fuck.
I took a bite of the cupcake to be polite, to give myself time to compose my face.
The frosting tasted sour. I swallowed anyway. The cake stuck in my throat and I forced it down with a breath that shook in my chest.
“I must’ve mixed up the dates,” I said, but it sounded lame even to me.
Fiona laughed, but there was something brittle in it. “Oh my God, right? Like hashtag-asylum-life. One day they tell you it’s Tuesday and the next you’re half convinced they’ve skipped a week just to see if you notice.”
Bláthnaid nodded too quickly, brushing a smear of frosting from her thumb with visible irritation. “Time goes weird in places like this. Routine’s the only thing that keeps you sane.”
Only Dervla watched me with narrowed eyes.
I thought back to before. To the fundraiser… no, the fundraiser was definitely in early March. Which meant I had been here since March.
And I had only been here four months…
My pulse drummed. My hand gripped the edge of the table hard, fingers biting into the wood, trying to ground me as something colder than panic coiled in my belly.
I’d lost a month.
My stomach clenched hard enough to make me dizzy. Thirty days. Four weeks wiped from my brain like they had never happened.
What had I done during that time? Had I fought? Had I cried? Had I smiled at him? The violation of it was suffocating.
A whole month where bruises healed. Where that fucking tattoo healed.
He could take hours.
He could take days.
He could take weeks from me.
And I wouldn’t remember.
I sat at that damned art table well after the session was over, alone, the hole of an entire missing month gaping in my chest.
My fingers marked charcoal across the pages, one angry black stroke for every day I’d been trapped in this godforsaken asylum.
My throat tightened until swallowing hurt, and “The Parting Glass” looped in my skull anyway, the same few bars over and over.
There was no mistake.
I had lost a month.
My hand drifted to my hip, to the place where bruises had bloomed. And then just fucking disappeared. No lingering yellow bruises. Just gone.
I tugged my dress hem up and looked at the Medusa ink curling flat over my upper thigh.
There had been no scabbing. No itching. No soreness that made me wince when fabric brushed it. I searched my memory for the dull throb of healing and found nothing but blank space.
I hadn’t just lost a month.
Something had been done to me during it.
The urge to tear up the paper hit so fast my hands shook. I forced myself to keep breathing through my nose because if I opened my mouth, I’d start screaming and I wasn’t sure I’d stop.
A shadow fell across the page.
My heart thudded up into my throat, my chair legs scraping when I jerked, and the echo made it sound like someone else moved from across the room.
Dervla stood there, hands shoved into the pockets of her dress, lip ring catching the light. Her dark hair fell sleek and straight, framing her pale face, but her eyes held something fierce.
I shoved my hem down quickly before she could see the ink.
“So,” she said, low as if anyone might be listening. “We need to talk, Liath.”