It had taken her three months to notice that the visits had stopped, so deeply buried was she in her own mind. They hadn’t even been able to give her the note when it arrived, she’d been so lost.

Catatonic, they’d said. She’d seen her notes; the psychiatrist at the Institute liked to use them as a means of showing progress to everyone, including the client. The admission statement made stark reading, containing phrases like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and extreme psychological trauma.

In lay terms, it was a breakdown. She’d dealt with more than her mind could take, and it had gone away, whimpering, to a place it could heal, leaving her little more than the basic autonomic functions to manage with until it recovered.

She ran shaking fingers over the paper, feeling again the almost glassy smoothness that Kate had preferred to go with her ever ready fountain pen, and the loss washed over her again.