She had listened.

She had turned the whole of her formidable, disciplined mind — the mind that had dismantled a hundred prosecutions — to the single task of listening, and remembering, and waiting.

She did not yet know what she was waiting for.

She only knew, with the certainty of a woman who had spent her life reading the guilty, that something in this room was wrong, and that if she stayed sharp in the dark long enough, it would eventually say so out loud.

The strangest cruelty of the locked-in dark was that her mind was entirely intact.

People imagined a coma as a kind of dreamless sleep, a mercy, an absence — and for all Adaira knew, for some patients it was.