Chapter 21: A Touch of Sanity
The metallic taste from the stairwell seemed to have seeped into her gums, a permanent stain. Susanna had scrubbed her mouth at the sink until her gums bled, but it lingered, a phantom reminder. She found herself in the library not to read, but to hide in the only place that held a semblance of silence.
It was a false quiet. The fluorescent lights buzzed like angry insects trapped in the fixtures. The air was stale, thick with the smell of decaying paper and the faint, sharp tang of old leather bindings. She sat on the worn linoleum floor in a narrow aisle between two towering shelves of medical journals, her back against the cold oak. A heavy volume on dissociative disorders lay open in her lap, the words a gray blur of clinical terms that meant nothing. Her mind was a shattered windshield, each fragment reflecting a different moment: the cold railing, the slap of skin, the spiral of her shirt into the dark.
A soft footfall, barely there, approached. Not the confident, predatory click of Lisa’s boots. This was a shuffle, the sound of scuffed slippers.
Daisy Randone eased herself down, her back against the opposite shelf, so their knees were almost touching. She held a thin paperback of poetry, her finger marking a page. She didn’t look at Susanna immediately, just sat in the shared silence, letting it settle.
“This floor is freezing,” Daisy whispered finally, her voice raspy from disuse. “Gives me hemorrhoids just thinking about it.”
A startled, wet sound escaped Susanna—a laugh or a sob, she wasn’t sure. She wiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand.
Daisy glanced over. Her eyes, usually wide and distant, were clear, focused. She took in Susanna’s posture, the death-grip on the book, the way she seemed to be trying to fold into herself. “You look like you’ve seen the underside of the world,” Daisy said, not unkindly.
Susanna shrugged, a tight, miserable movement. The words I’m fine sat on her tongue, brittle and transparent. She couldn’t say them.
“I used to hide in here,” Daisy continued, looking up at the shelves looming over them like cliffs. “Thought if I read enough of these,” she tapped a journal with her toe, “I’d find my own diagnosis printed right there. ‘Girl, Generally Afraid.’ Case study number five.”
“Did you find it?” Susanna’s own voice sounded foreign.
“No. Just a lot of words for things that… aren’t the thing.” Daisy was quiet for a moment. “I know what it’s like to feel like you’re drowning. And someone hands you a cinderblock instead of a rope.”
Susanna’s breath caught. She stared hard at a water stain on the page in her lap, its edges blurring.
“Lisa’s games,” Daisy said, the name dropping between them like a stone. “They’re not love. They’re chains she forges so she doesn’t float away. The problem is, you’re the one who ends up sinking.”
The truth of it, spoken in Daisy’s soft, matter-of-fact rasp, was a cleaver. It cut through the fog of shame, leaving a clean, sharp pain. Susanna’s eyes burned. A tear slipped out, tracing a hot path down her cheek. She didn’t move to stop it.
Daisy shifted. Slowly, she reached out and placed her hand on Susanna’s knee. Her touch was warm, solid, a simple anchor in the swirling cold. The weight of it was nothing like Lisa’s demanding grip. It was just there. Present.
“You don’t have to be her thing,” Daisy said, her thumb moving in a small, unconscious circle on the grey sweatpants. “You can be a lot of other things. Scared. Angry. Quiet. You can even just be nothing for a while. But you don’t have to be her thing.”
The kindness was almost unbearable. It was the crack in the dam. Susanna bent her head, shoulders shaking with silent tears she could no longer contain. She cried for the violation in the stairwell, for her own complicity, for the terrifying freedom in Daisy’s words. She cried for the self she’d lost before she’d even arrived at Claymoore.
Daisy didn’t shush her. Didn’t pat her or offer empty platitudes. She just kept her hand on Susanna’s knee, a steady, grounding pressure amid the silent storm. The hum of the lights filled the space where words couldn’t go.
When the tremors subsided, leaving Susanna hollowed out and raw, she finally looked up. Daisy was watching her, a sad understanding in her gaze.
“She’ll be back for you,” Daisy said, not as a threat, but as a weather report. “She doesn’t like it when her things develop minds of their own.”
“What do I do?” The question was a child’s whisper.
Daisy withdrew her hand, picking at the corner of her poetry book. “You remember this,” she said. “This right here. You remember that someone saw you, and it wasn’t a transaction.” She stood up, her joints popping. She looked small between the giant shelves. “Also, maybe find a better hiding spot. She checks here.”
Daisy gave her a last, small nod and shuffled away, her footsteps fading into the maze of books.
Susanna sat alone in the sudden, immense quiet. The seed of fury she’d felt on the stairs was still there, but now it had been watered by a different thing. Not just rage, but a fragile, defiant sense of self-preservation. Daisy had seen the stain and hadn’t asked her to taste it. She had simply acknowledged it was there, and then pointed, however gently, toward a door.
Susanna closed the heavy textbook. She pushed herself to her feet, her legs stiff. She didn’t know where to go, but she knew she couldn’t stay in this aisle waiting to be found. She slid the book back onto its shelf, her fingers brushing the spines of a hundred other case studies, a hundred other stories of damage and survival.
She walked out of the library, the buzz of the lights fading behind her. The hallway felt different. Not safer, but somehow more real. The choice Daisy had offered hung in the air before her, immense and terrifying.
She could choose something else.
She just had to figure out what that was, and find the strength to reach for it before Lisa came to reclaim what she thought was hers.