Keep calm and eat chocolate.
It used to be my favorite motto, and the slogan of our family empire—an empire I was next in line to control until certain family members staged a coup. Now they’re sitting pretty in my house and my company. They spend my money and live it up, while I holiday in this amazing white palace where the lights never go out, and padded rooms is an exaggeration.
I know everyone in here says this, but I’m not crazy.
My family, if you could call them that, spent a long time trying to make it look like I am. It worked, or I wouldn’t have questioned myself and sought counselling, and they wouldn’t have put me in this place. I read the regulations once a few months ago: involuntary commitment order under section something of the blah–blah act of some year that’s not as archaic as I imagined.
Translation: bullshit.
How can it be legal to institutional someone for refusing medical treatment for a mental illness they don’t bloody well have?
At least the place reflect the current century. State of the art facilities, comfortable rooms, decent food, and the ability to purchase luxuries if you have the means. Actual money isn’t allowed, of course. If you follow the logic that I’m crazy, then a credit card is a lethal weapon. Everything must been done by fingerprint: access to rooms, our private locker, meds, the lot.
My day consists of set meal times, menus, exercise, recreation, activity times, therapy sessions, and medications. Not much of a change to my real life actually. Gym session, breakfast with my PA to review my calendar, meetings, correspondence, more meetings, often a function for dinner with a nice piece of man–candy on my arm, a run or a swim, sleep. Repeat.
Now, though, I don’t have a choice to blow off a meeting or grab a takeaway on my way home from a late night event.
The only upside to the place I now call home is the gardens. Not only do they obscure the fences, giving an illusion of freedom, but they are quiet and usually unoccupied. Most of the other residents have unnatural phobias involving open spaces, insects, or plants. In Henry’s case it’s the color green. So I often have an hour or more to myself to focus on taking my real life back.
I’ve considered everything. I could jump the fence, drug the night staff, cause a riot, start a fire, even hire a helicopter to fly in and pick me up. Anything except participate in the program. I won’t admit to being crazy, and prove the bastards who put me here right.
That’s never going to happen.
Instead, I watch and listen. The staff assumes the residents either can’t understand or don’t care, so they talk freely. I know who has money problems, husbands with a bit on the side, naggy ex–wives, and the ones I could bribe to get out— if I had access to my damn money.
Arseholes. I still can’t believe the people I trusted had me snatched up in the middle of night and committed to this psychiatric facility, especially when they've seen what a vindictive bitch I can be. I bet they think I’m a problem solved. I also bet they haven’t planned on my use of the phone here to retain a new lawyer.
It’s the task I’ve spent my time on; the only one I’ve thought about.
Until the day Christopher Tailor arrived.
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