Isabella POV
The paper was still in my fist when the sound came.
At first, it wasn’t a scream. It started deep inside my chest. Then it slowly rose to my throat until a broken cry escaped my lips. It didn’t even sound like my own voice.
I curled into a ball on the bed and pulled my knees close to my chest, just like I did when I was a little girl and everything felt too big for me. My shoulders shook. I opened my mouth, but only broken sounds came out.
Grandma Eleanor was gone.
She had been dead for a whole week…
And I never knew.
While I was lying in this hospital bed, taking the pills they gave me every day, they buried her.
Maybe they dressed her. Maybe they held a funeral. Maybe everyone who loved her was there.
Except me.
I wasn’t there to hold her hand, and tell her goodbye.
I cried until my chest hurt, until my throat burned.
I cried until there were no tears left.
But then…
The tears stopped. That scared me more than anything.
A granddaughter should be able to cry for the woman who raised her. She should have tears left. But the medicine had taken that away too. It was like someone had turned off the part of me that could cry.
I lay there, shaking with dry eyes.
And for the first time, I understood the truth.
They were slowly destroying me.
Piece by piece.
I don’t remember deciding to run. One second I was lying on the bed.
The next, my bare feet were touching the cold floor. My hand grabbed the door handle.
My heart was beating so hard I could hear it inside my ears.
The door wasn’t locked anymore. They had stopped locking it after the second week, once they decided I was too sedated to be dangerous.
But they were wrong.
I hurried down the hallway.
My hospital gown brushed against my legs as I walked.
One hand stayed on the wall because everything around me kept spinning.
The lights buzzed above me.
Somewhere nearby, I heard a cart rolling.
Then I saw it.
The double doors.
Above them was a glowing red EXIT sign.
For one beautiful moment…
I believed I would make it.
Then someone grabbed my arm.
“Madam, Madam, stop.”
They can’t even mention my name.
No one here ever called me Isabella.
I pulled away.
I struggled.
I kicked the floor.. I screamed, “Let go of me. Let go, I have to go to my grandmother. She needs me, I have to go, please, someone let me out…”
Two more sets of hands arrived. A shoulder pressed against my back. Someone caught me as my knees gave out.They lowered me to the floor.
Not roughly. Not cruelly. Just like people who had done this many times before. To many other patients.
“I’m not sick,” I cried.
“I’m not insane,” My voice broke.
“I’m not… Please… I just want to go home.”
A soft voice spoke beside my ear.
“I know.” Soft, almost sorry. “I know you believe that.”
Those words hurt more than the hands holding me down.
I felt something cold touch my arm. An alcohol swab. Then I saw the doctor standing a few steps away. His hands were behind his back. His face looked full of concern.
But his eyes were empty.
“No…” I whispered.
“No… please…”
The needle went into my arm.
I don’t know how long I slept.
Time no longer made sense. When I finally opened my eyes, my mouth was dry.
The ceiling looked blurry. It seemed to move like water.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember my name.
Isabella.
I held onto that name with everything I had. I don’t want to lose my identity.
Isabella Hart.
But then, quietly, a new thought entered in beside it, and this one was worse than anything the injection had done to my body.
A frightening one.
What if they are right?
What if everything I remembered wasn’t real?
The engagement, Matteo cheating on me.
The breakup, The drug.
His hand was holding mine while I couldn’t move. Lying helpless on the cold apartment floor.
What if none of it happened the way I remembered?
What if my fear had created a story inside my mind?
What if I believed that story because it was easier than accepting the truth?
I stared at the ceiling.
Slowly, I felt myself falling apart.
I could not remember what day I had arrived. I couldn’t remember how many injections they had given me. If someone asked me right then if Matteo had really done this…
I wasn’t sure I could answer.
Maybe…
Maybe I really was losing my mind. The thought didn’t come suddenly. It came slowly. Like water filling a room. By the time I noticed it…
It had already reached my knees.
I turned my face into the pillow. No tears came. I had none left. Only a small, broken sound escaped my lips.
It was the sound of a person quietly drowning.
The doctor came into my room without knocking.
He never knocked. I learned that during my first week here.
This wasn’t my home. But somehow, it had become the only place I existed.
He walked in slowly, like the room belonged to him. A folder rested under his arm.
“I saw what happened in the hallway,” he said.
He didn’t even look at me.
“That wasn’t like you, Isabella.”
I said nothing.
He looked calm.
Like someone who already knew how this conversation would end.
“We are trying to help here,” he said as he looked through the papers.
“Stop trying to act smart. And Matteo will worry.”
My heart tightened.
“Matteo is not my family,” I said quietly.
My voice sounded weak.
The doctor smiled a little. Not a warm smile. The kind that made my skin crawl.
“He has been covering the cost of your care personally. Every session. Every medication.”
He closed the folder.
“The actions of a guilty man don’t look like this, Isabella.”
“They look like the actions of a man who truly loves someone… even when she refuses to help herself.”
I looked away.
“By labeling me insane?” I whispered.
The doctor leaned forward.
“I know everything you’re saying about that night comes from your own memory.”
“And grief can confuse the mind.”
“When people go through something painful, their minds sometimes change the memories.”
“They believe things happened differently.”
“Do you understand?”
I did understand. That was the terrible part.
He was not accusing me of lying. He was worse than that. He was trying to make me doubt myself. He wanted me to believe I wasn’t betrayed.
That I wasn’t drugged.
That I wasn’t trapped.
That I was simply sick.
Because believing I was mentally ill was much easier than believing someone had planned all this.
“I want to visit my grandmother’s grave,” I said.
For a second…
Something changed in his eyes.
It disappeared so quickly I wasn’t sure if I had imagined it.
Then his face became calm again.
“Then behave,” he said as he stood up.
“One step at a time.”
Then he walked out.
The door closed behind him.
He had not raised his voice once. He had not needed to. That was the thing I understood then, staring at the closed door, that some men did not need cruelty to destroy a person. They only needed patience, and a folder, and the quiet, reasonable voice of someone the world had already decided to believe.
The door opened sometime later. I recognized the soft footsteps.
The nurse. She checked my pulse first.
Then she looked at the file at the end of my bed. She was different from the others.
She still looked at me like I was not insane.
Not just another patient. She was the same nurse who once whispered that she didn’t believe I was insane.
“They’re going to give you something else tonight,” she said whispered, not quite meeting my eyes now. “For the agitation. Doctor’s orders, after what happened in the hallway.”
Another injection.
I did not fight this one. I didn’t have the strength anymore.
I stayed still as she rolled up my sleeve.
The cold cotton touched my skin.
Then the needle went in.
“There,” she said softly. “That should help you rest.”
My eyes were already growing heavy.
The room slowly became blurry. But a small part of me was still awake.
A stubborn part. The part they hadn’t taken away yet. I slipped fingers into the loose corner of the mattress.
I pulled out the folded piece of paper.
My hand shook.
My vision became blurry.
“Wait…” I whispered.
She paused at the door, half turned. “Isabella, you need to sleep…”
She is the only one that still mentions my name though she whispers it.
“Please.” My voice cracked.
I held the folded paper toward her. My arm trembling with the effort of keeping it raised. “Please. You said I’m not.. you said it. I heard you.”
She stared at the paper. Then she looked at me. Fear filled her eyes.
“I can’t,” she whispered.”If anyone finds out I…”
“Please.”
The word barely came out.
“It’s the only name I have left, that can save me.”
Everything around me was fading.
The medicine was pulling me back into darkness. But I kept my arm raised. I kept the paper held out between us, my last person, my last thread back to the world outside this white room.
Her fingers closed around it.
I did not see her face when she read the name written on it in my small, careful handwriting.
I was already falling.
But somewhere, right at the edge of the dark pulling me under, I heard her breath catch, sharp, startled, almost afraid, and I heard her whisper two words before the door clicked shut behind her.
“Oh God.”