“I’m imagining it, am I, Hugh?” Madeleine came back angrily. “Is that what you’re telling yourself?”
McCauley put up his hand to caution Hugh. “Madeleine, it concerns me that you are speaking of doing violence, that you see yourself as an arbitrator of life and death.”
“As a writer, you idiot!” Madeleine spat. “Well, I’m not staying!” She grabbed the laptop. “You can both go to hell!”
“I’m afraid I can’t sign your release papers while I hold these concerns, Madeleine.” McCauley stood his ground.
“Sign, don’t sign. I don’t care,” Madeleine said attempting to sidestep him. “I’m going.”
McCauley moved out of the way. Two male health workers stood in the doorway. “I’m afraid you can’t, Madeleine. Hugh and I both agree that you should remain here for your own good.”
Madeleine stared at the men who barred her way, realising suddenly that Hugh and McCauley were trying to commit her. Horror. Fury. Fear. She charged the health workers in a desperate attempt to run. To get out of the hospital.
“Maddie…”
She could hear Hugh pleading with her.
The health workers seized her. Madeleine struggled. The laptop slipped from her hands, falling open as it hit the floor. The screen shattered and the hard plastic shell of the computer cracked. Madeleine screamed, striking out at her captors as she scrambled to retrieve it. What followed was blurred with tears and panic. The humiliation of a strait jacket and sedatives. Hugh turned his back and she was confined. And she screamed for Edward. Wept for Edward who waited in prison for her to write him out.
Edward didn’t write, couldn’t write. His notebooks had been taken as evidence that first night. Leith and Denholm had done their best, but with two witnesses who swore he’d stabbed Elliot Kaufman, things did not go well. Denholm lodged an appeal as soon as the verdict was handed down. Peter Blake had secured a book deal with Middleton Meyer. The purportedly intimate portrait of Edward McGinnity, orphan, celebrated novelist, and vicious murderer was expected to be a bestseller. Edward’s own sales figures had also soared. Leith brought him clippings of the reviews which invariably detected homicidal predilections in his work.
The penitentiary felt strangely familiar, an adult version of the boys’ home to which he’d been consigned for a time years ago, when, after escaping from the foster home for a third time, it had been decided that he was uncontrollable. Paper and pencils were a privilege which he would have to earn with good behaviour, compliance which required a deadening of the spirit and the mind. Instead Edward retreated. Some part of him had broken with the realisation that it was Willow who had betrayed him from the first. He grieved the friendship but nothing else. He didn’t want to finish his manuscript; he was not sure why. For a while Madeleine d’Leon’s story had been everything, but now he wanted only to keep her to himself. He couldn’t expose her to the scrutiny of the world. He didn’t have that courage anymore.
They wouldn’t allow Madeleine to write in the hospital. Her laptop was beyond repair anyway, and her manuscript lost. Hugh sold the television rights to the Veronica Killwilly novels with the power of attorney Madeleine had granted him. The series was a ratings and commercial success, and film and merchandising deals were quick to follow. In all of this, Madeleine had no interest. But she watched Edward still, thought about him, dreamt about him. By forbidding her to write, they’d given her permission just to be with him undistracted by plots or twists or inconvenient love interests. Now he was simply hers.
“Maddie, darling, what can I do?”
She looked past the doctors, the orderlies, and smiled at him.
McCauley couldn’t explain Madeleine d’Leon’s decline. He could not diagnose what caused her increasing detachment from reality, her lack of interest in getting better. Hugh visited once or twice and then he stopped. Madeleine barely noticed.
***
In the end, he was a thought so whole that she was aware of nothing else.
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