Chapter 2

Pinecrest Psychiatric Facility smelled like bleach and despair.

I had been here for eleven days.

I knew this because I scratched a line into the wall beside my bed each morning with the edge of my thumbnail, a primitive calendar that was the only proof time was still passing.

They had taken everything.

My phone. My clothes. My name.

The wristband on my arm read: Patient 4471. Involuntary Hold. Diagnosis: Delusional Disorder, Postpartum Psychosis.

I wasn't psychotic.

I had a six-inch incision across my abdomen held together with forty-two staples that itched and pulled every time I breathed.

But when I showed the nurses, they noted it in my chart as "self-harm consistent with somatic delusion."

Dominic had built the cage perfectly.

He had bought every lock, every guard, every doctor in this building.

On the twelfth day, he visited.

I was sitting on the edge of my cot, staring at the barred window, when the door buzzed open.

He walked in wearing a navy suit and the cologne I used to love—sandalwood and cedar, the scent that once meant safety.

Now it made my stomach heave.

"You look better," he said, sitting in the plastic chair across from me. He crossed his legs and adjusted his watch. "The doctors say you're responding to the medication."

"I'm not taking the medication," I said flatly. "I spit it out when they leave."

A flicker of irritation crossed his face.

"Ivy, this would be easier if you cooperated."

"Where is my daughter?"

"Colette's daughter," he corrected, his voice sharpening. "And she's thriving. She smiled for the first time yesterday. Colette cried."

The image detonated inside my chest.

My baby's first smile. And a stranger caught it.

"What do you want?" I whispered.

He leaned forward. His elbows rested on his knees, his posture almost intimate.

"I want you to sign the divorce papers," he said. "Quietly. No contest. You walk away with nothing."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you stay here," he said simply. "Indefinitely. The court has already granted the conservatorship. I control your medical decisions, your finances, your freedom. You are, legally speaking, incompetent."

He pulled a manila envelope from his briefcase and placed it on the cot beside me.

"Sign, and I'll release you. You can go back to your mother's house in Vermont. Start over. Forget this ever happened."

"Forget my daughter?"

"She was never yours," he said, and his voice was so steady, so rehearsed, that I knew he had practiced this speech.

I looked at the envelope.

I looked at the bars on the window.

I looked at the man who had dismantled my entire existence with a pen and a lie.

"I'll sign," I said.

Relief washed over his face—brief, controlled, but unmistakable.

He handed me the pen.

I uncapped it.

I pressed the tip to the paper.

And then I drove it into the back of his hand.

The Mont Blanc sank into flesh and tendon with a wet, satisfying crunch.

Dominic screamed.

He yanked his hand back, the pen still embedded, blood spraying across the white sheets.

I lunged for the door.

I made it three steps into the hallway before the orderlies tackled me.

The last thing I saw before the sedative hit was Dominic, cradling his bleeding hand, staring at me with something I had never seen in his eyes before.

Fear.