The Door Opens from the Outside

Claire returns to consciousness the way a drowning person breaks the surface — briefly, involuntarily, and without any guarantee of staying. The studio floor is cold against her cheek. Charlie is barking somewhere outside. And a voice is speaking to her, tight with fear, saying her name over and over as though repetition might be enough to hold her in the world. The voice belongs to someone Claire can almost place — someone from before, from the café, from a conversation that happened in a different lifetime. This person has found her among the glass and the blood and the scattered evidence of everything that happened in the hours before dawn, and is doing the only thing left to do: calling for help.

Claire drifts between presence and absence, catching fragments without context. Hands on her wrist. A phone call made in a voice that keeps breaking. The word "pills" spoken to someone who will know what it means. She tries to move and nothing responds. She tries to speak and nothing emerges. Her body has become something that happens to her rather than something she operates, and the distance between wanting and doing has become a chasm she cannot cross. The fluorescent lights above her buzz with a sound she recognises from a room she spent eight years trying to forget, and the past and present begin to merge — the studio floor and the hospital bed, the hands reaching for her now and the hands that held her down then, the voice saying "stay with me" and the voice that said "she's not well, anyone can see that."

When the paramedics arrive, Claire's world contracts further. Practised hands replace panicked ones. Professional voices speak about her body in the third person — pupils, overdose, blood pressure, terms that reduce her to a set of symptoms requiring management. A needle enters her arm. A mask covers her face. She is lifted onto a stretcher and loaded into a vehicle and driven toward a place she has been before, a place with corridors and locked doors and people who will decide what happens to her because she has lost the right to decide for herself. The siren announces her passage through the town, and somewhere between the studio and the hospital, Claire thinks of Mack, of Rose, of what they will be told and who will tell them and whether anyone will think to make it gentle.

The hospital receives her the way hospitals receive everyone — efficiently, impersonally, with the particular compassion of systems designed to process damage at scale. Claire watches the ceiling pass above her and feels the last thread of resistance give way. The darkness is there, waiting, warm and patient, asking nothing of her. She lets it take her. It is easier than staying.