Ophelia O'Donovan wasn't looking for a savior. And Jordan Redd was through with lost causes. Sometimes the lies we tell ourselves are simply the echoes of a path we didn't take. Sometimes the wrong obsession leads you to who you're meant to become.

Chapter One

I could tell you the exact day it all started to go wrong, but that isn't really what it's about for you, is it? I've been here for six weeks now ringing the bells at Bedlam, and taking my pills and doing everything I'm told-but somewhere, someone above you has decided that it isn't enough and now it's up to you to "reinvigorate" my progress. Yeah, I heard that word. And let me tell you something else-the reason they've sent me to you isn't nearly the opportunity you think it is. Trust me. I used to work for the kind of company that likes to measure progress with a ruler too, and all I can tell you is that I'm not so much a test for you as a guaranteed black mark on what I can only imagine has been a pretty average, conventional career.

Believe me when I say that that doctor who signs your checks-the one who paces around this floor like a captain, trying to figure out what dead weight he can toss overboard in a storm-I worked for someone like him. I'm not your big chance to prove your therapeutic prowess, I'm a dead end he's looking to write off in someone else's account-someone he doesn't like very much. Someone he doesn't think will be missed.

For some reason, he can't quite get his mind around, no matter how much you people try to reach me-I just can't seem to Get with the Program. So, in the spirit of living drone comradery, I'm going to do something I promised myself I wouldn't. I'm going to give you some of what happened and you can tell him whatever the fuck you want. It won't be the whole story, but trust me, he won't know the difference. Job security in the nuthatch-that's my gift to you. Raise the pages to God and you shall be healed.

So, I got to work late-this was sometime in late September. And it wasn't unusual that I was late, just so you understand that up front. The chronic inability to manage how much time it actually takes me to drive somewhere has been a long running theme in my life. I've tried all sorts of things to train myself out of it. Nothing works. Beneath it, I suspect there is some deep philosophical aversion to leaving my house for any reason whatsoever, but that'll figure in later, so no need to borrow trouble. Anyway, like I said-late.

Most mornings it wasn't about anything at all, but that particular morning it was about finding a quick way to pull together just enough gas money to get me to all the basic city appointments I had to keep the Northville ink flowing. On a weekly paper like ours, our pages of copy were always running neck and neck with the amount of advertisements our sales staff had managed to hustle that week. Maybe hustle is the wrong word for it, but to be honest, it certainly was starting to feel like a hustle for over a year-the time I had been writing there. At that point, our newspaper had basically become a grocery store circular with pretentions. And almost no one read anything at all that we wrote.

As long as we submitted enough pages to round out the advertisements, the Powers That Be swooped through the room like the Pope granting absolution, off to do god knows what on the mysterious second floor. Some people claimed they were going to be our brand-new offices. My co-worker David and I joked that they were probably just some wormhole to another dimension where the owners would flit Doctor Who style back to the seventies when print journalism was all the rage, and then live it up at all-night drug and orgy parties banging their own grandmothers. Who knows? We might've been right. None of us were ever invited up there.

So that morning was about making some quick cash-which for me, meant a humiliating call to my then ex-boyfriend, or a trip to the blood bank to sell some plasma. I chose the plasma. That morning, it took longer than usual because the only girl working was someone who didn't like me and kept me waiting at the front desk-mostly as a point of honor. By the time she got me seated it