"Your brother is here," the nurse informed her curtly while removing the leather restraints with an unnecessarily vicious tug.
There were shadows beneath Lucille's eyes, bruises at her wrists, but her face was radiant. No four words could have sounded sweeter to her ears. Thomas! His name clang noisily in her chest, a triumphant bell peeling out after seven years of silence and misery.
And it had been miserable. Lucille had stopped resisting the asylum staff long ago, quickly learning to greet the petty cruelties and the real torments of treatment with silence and stoniness. Her heart was locked up as tightly and securely as she was, utterly removed and remote. Full days frequently passed where she didn't speak to anyone, her only interest in gazing out the window and observing the progress of a spider web.
Had the nurse bothered to look at her withdrawn patient's face now, however, she would have seen something shining in Lucille's eyes that hadn't been there in years: hope.
Hands clasped before her, Lucille followed the nurse down the winding staircase to the asylum's administrative offices on the first floor. The last time she had been permitted in this part of the building she had been a child, her murdered mother's blood still caked beneath her fingernails.
The administrator was waiting for her in his office, looking portly and prosperous.
"Well my dear, your time with us is at an end," he announced fingering his moustache and seeming far more interested in its luxuriousness than the girl before him. "Your brother has come to escort you home, as is only proper. If you'll just wait here while he signs the necessary forms, we can see that you're discharged."
Lucille only listened to this with half an ear, a fast erratic, tempo building in her chest. Where was Thomas? Would he sound the same? Look the same? How tall would he be? Despite her pale, impassive face, Lucille's body was practically humming in anticipation.