Chapter 2

My struggling was a joke against two heavy-set men.

With practiced cruelty, they bound my arms and legs with thick leather restraints and dragged me out.

The moment they shoved me into the back of the white medical van, I looked through the tinted window and saw Chloe taking the check from David's hands.

They fell into each other's arms, their faces glowing with filthy relief.

The heavy steel doors slammed shut, cutting off the world outside.

Lying on the freezing floor, immobilized, tears spilled silently down my cheeks.

I spent twenty years breaking my back over a hot stove just to raise a cold-blooded viper.

I thought I had come to save my daughter. In reality, I was just a fool delivering a payday to her doorstep.

St. Marian's Private Psychiatric Facility, Melbourne.

It sounded like a quiet retreat, but in reality, it was an extortion racket—a living hell for the inconvenient.

When the two orderlies dragged me out of the van, the stench of clinical bleach mingled with an underlying scent of mold and neglect hit me like a slap.

The fluorescent hallways were blindingly white, echoing with faint, hollow weeping and incoherent muttering.

I was hauled into a sterile office where an icy blonde woman introduced herself as Head Nurse Sarah Evans.

She held an intake file bearing my daughter's signature.

Under the diagnosis section, bold letters read: *Severe paranoid schizophrenia accompanied by violent, aggressive outbursts.*

"Mrs. Miller," Nurse Evans said flatly, her eyes devoid of any human warmth.

"Your daughter has prepaid for three months of intensive inpatient treatment. A total of fifty thousand dollars."

"She specifically requested that you receive the 'most comprehensive' sedation therapy we provide."

Fifty thousand dollars.

Using my own sweat-and-blood money to lock me away in a cage, expecting me to rot in gratitude.

What a wonderful daughter.

"I am not sick! She framed me to steal my life savings!"

I screamed with every ounce of air in my lungs, desperately trying to get through to her.

Nurse Evans just offered a condescending smirk and snapped the folder shut.

"Every patient in here claims they aren't sick, Mrs. Miller." She gestured to the guards.

"Take her to Ward 3. Administer a high-dose sedative immediately. Let's get her calm."

The orderlies grabbed my arms instantly.

I fought back, but that only earned me rougher handling.

The needle was freezing as it tore through my skin. A heavy, burning fluid rushed through my bloodstream.

My eyelids weighed a thousand pounds. The room spun, and everything went black.

They dumped me onto a concrete-hard cot in a room with a single window barricaded by welded steel mesh.

When I woke up, a whole day had passed.

I was forced to swallow a harsh legal reality: under Australian law, I was currently categorized as an incapacitated psychiatric patient.

My legal guardian was my daughter, Chloe. She held the power of attorney over my care and my assets.

Crying, arguing, and screaming were completely useless here; in fact, they would only serve as "proof" of my deteriorating mental health.

I couldn't break down. And above all, I couldn't actually go crazy.

If I lost my mind, those two monsters would win, and my life would truly be over.

From that day on, I started playing dumb.

Whenever the nurses brought medication, I swallowed it obediently—tucking the bitter pills beneath the root of my tongue, and spitting them down the drain the second I reached the restroom. During group therapy, I sat curled in the corner, staring blankly at the wall, giggling and mumbling incoherent words.

My "docility" caused the nurses to drop their guard. Nurse Evans clearly wrote me off as a broken old woman whose mind had been hollowed out by sedatives.

I began observing everything in secret.

The layout of the ward, the security cameras' blind spots, the shift change schedules, and the behavioral patterns of the staff.

Most patients were genuinely lost in their own minds. But there were one or two whose eyes held the same terrible clarity and silent desperation as mine.

We never spoke. But in brief, passing glances, we exchanged an understanding that needed no words.