Hers was not.

Hers was a fully awake woman sealed inside a body that had simply stopped answering.

She could think as clearly as she ever had.

She could reason, remember, calculate, rage.

She could compose entire cross-examinations in her head and have nowhere to deliver them.

It was, she thought in her bleaker hours, a version of the exact nightmare every trial lawyer secretly carries — to know the truth completely, to hold it whole and clear, and to be unable to make a single soul hear it.