25. Liath
LIATH
My name from Dervla’s mouth hit me like a sledgehammer. Heat flared under my skin, but I forced my reaction back behind a placid face.
I scanned the art room. The vastness of it stared back, chairs pushed in, paper scraps and clay molds abandoned, the high ceiling holding every sound like a confession.
We were alone, for now, but a nurse could appear at the door and hear the wrong sentence.
I turned back to her. “What did you call me?”
“I know you’re not Rua.”
My lungs seized mid-breath and my fingers curled around the edge of the paper until it crumpled. “W-what?”
She didn’t repeat herself like she needed to convince me. She watched me like she was waiting for me to confirm it.
I frowned at her, suspicion snapping tight in my chest. Was this a test? A trap? Had someone put her up to this?
Deargán had shown me how fast comfort became a weapon in this place.
Dervla was my friend, and that made her more dangerous, not less.
My stomach turned with shame. I wanted to believe her so badly I could taste it.
I forced my face into neutrality and kept my voice light. “You’re tired, Derv.”
I hated how easily I pretended.
“I’m Rua,” I added, but the words scraped on the way out, wrong against my teeth.
Dervla’s gaze dropped to the marks on the paper, to the charcoal ground under my nails, to the torn edges of paper.
“I know what it looks like,” she said, her voice roughened, “when they start rewriting you. When they tell you a story about yourself and wait for you to start nodding along.”
A lump developed in my throat, making it hard to speak.
“If I tell you something…” Her eyes darted toward the door before she leaned in closer. “You can’t tell anyone.”
My pulse thudded in my ears. Secrets were dangerous. Especially here. But I nodded anyway.
“No. Swear it,” she said. “Not that polite shite. Swear it like you mean it.”
“I swear it on my real mam’s grave and on my own damn soul. If a word of it leaves my mouth, may I rot beside her.”
She leaned in, her voice dropping. “I’m not crazy. Just because I dyed my hair black, got a piercing, and like girls, that doesn’t mean I’m losing my feckin’ mind.” She rolled her eyes.
“So why?”
“My parents died when I was sixteen,” she said, her lip ring catching the light as she scowled. “They left the whole estate to me when I turn twenty-one. Which is next month. My bastard uncle can’t touch a single cent of it… unless, of course, I’m declared permanently unfit.”
A sharp breath tore from my lips, my head shaking, fury and disbelief colliding in my chest. “They can’t do that. They can’t just lock you away like this.”
She sneered. “Well, he did, and they did.”
“But there has to be someone who knows the truth.”
“Yeah. Me. And now you.”
Rage rose so fast my hands went numb.
The Magdalene Institute sat heavy in my mind, its corridors, its locked doors, the way staff smiled without warmth. If her uncle could pull strings, who else was pulling them?
Deargán. Nurse Murphy. The head of the asylum.
The thought spread through me, slow and sickening. I forced my teeth apart before I cracked them.
Every time I’d swallowed a protest to keep the peace, every time I’d softened my voice so a man wouldn’t call me difficult, it came back up like bile.
It wasn’t fair. None of it had ever been fair. The world silenced girls like us, buried us beneath expectations and pleasantries, told us to smile through the ache, to sit still and be grateful.
And when we spoke up? When we dared to scream? They called us mad, hysterical, too emotional, too much. That rage, ancient and clawing, surged through me, fed by generations of women who’d been gaslit and shut away, dismissed as fragile or broken for refusing to play small.
The world didn’t want our voices. It wanted our silence. Our obedience.
Dervla’s hands shot out, snatching my arms, giving me a sharp shake, her grip fierce enough to ground me, to anchor me in place.
“Don’t accept the lie they’ve given you,” she hissed, her tone becoming urgent. “Don’t stop fighting them. Remember who you are.”
Tears burned in my eyes, but I blinked them back. “I won’t forget,” I said, breath shaking.
She grabbed a pair of craft scissors from the bench and snatched my hand into hers.
“You are Liath and you are not crazy. Say it.” Her gaze pinned mine, sharp as the blade she pressed to my palm.
“I am Liath,” I said, my voice rising. “And I will not forget.”
She made a quick slice, shallow but stinging, then turned the blade on herself, scoring her own skin with a matching cut. “I am Dervla. And I will not forget.”
She pressed our palms together. The pain flared, but the slick, warm slide of our blood mixing felt like an anchor tying me to the earth.
If staff saw this, we were finished.
If Dervla turned on me, she’d have proof I was only pretending to be Rua.
But looking into Dervla’s fierce, terrified eyes, I knew I would bleed for her again if I had to.
The truth was, I needed her. Needed at least one person in here to see me. To know me.
To know I was not crazy.
But it meant Deargán had gotten inside my head.
And the worst part was how quiet my body went when I imagined him coming back.
The forbidden wing looked different in the gray daylight filtering in from the hole in the roof. It didn’t look haunted, just sad and abandoned.
Dust lay thick across the floor where my footprints from the other night cut a path through the rubble.
I crouched beside them and brushed the dust away with my fingertips. The impressions were clear. My bare feet led straight to Maggie’s door. There was no second set beside them. No ghostly footprints guiding me here.
The memory of the girl walking ahead of me flickered through my mind.
My stomach tightened.
But I followed my own footprints back to Maggie’s room.
“Alright,” I murmured to the dim bedroom as I turned on my flashlight. “Let’s see what you were trying to show me.”
The wooden drawers groaned when I pulled them open.
Inside, folded dresses crumbled beneath my fingers, the fabric stiff with age, the hems eaten through by moths.
There was nothing useful in here. No letters. No diary. No confession. Just the quiet remains of a life that had ended in this room.
I found a small wool sweater tucked into the back corner of the cupboard. It was hand-knitted and tiny. Far too small for a girl Maggie’s age.
A doll’s sweater.
I lifted it carefully, fingering the soft pale-blue wool as my gaze swept the room again.
But no doll.
Like someone had taken whatever it belonged to and left only this behind.
I folded it carefully and set it back where I found it.
Whatever it had meant to Maggie, she’d wanted it kept safe.
Three books sat stacked on her bedside table.
I crouched beside them and brushed away a thin layer of dust.
The Bell Jar.
Speak.
The Yellow Wallpaper.
My fingers traced the spines. These were all stories about girls who were silenced. Girls no one believed. Girls people called mad.
It was an odd collection given Maggie’s state of mind. A disturbing collection.
I frowned. The spines weren’t cracked. Like she’d never opened them.
Like they’d been placed here. Like someone had wanted the story to feel convincing. Proof of her madness.
A shiver ran through me. Or maybe I just wanted her not to have been mad. Maybe I wanted so badly to believe in her that I was seeing things that didn’t exist.
I stood slowly, brushing dust from my hand onto my dress, and let out a long exhale.
“Brilliant, Maggie,” I muttered.
An abandoned room. And a pile of relics no one had bothered to clear out. Some grand revelation. She had brought me here for nothing.
My flashlight beam swept across the room one last time. The light caught the cracked mirror leaning against the wall beside the desk.
For a second the beam reflected straight back into my eyes. I flinched and angled the flashlight lower.
Something stood out in the reflection.
There were marks on the mirror.
I walked closer and leaned in.
Letters had been traced into the glass by a fingertip, but I couldn’t read them.
They were backward.
I spotted the wall behind me through the mirror’s reflection. The light reflecting off the glass had created shadows where the dust had gathered on her fingermarks. I turned toward the wall, keeping my flashlight pointed at the mirror.
It was writing. Letters the right way around across the wall. A message. But certain letters were missing.
Then something clicked. I tilted the mirror, lining up the dusty writing with her confession on the wall.
“Holy shite…”
My pulse pounded in my ears.
The mirror shifted another inch in my hands and the message rearranged itself.