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But I took the job anyway, because rent is rent and the alternative was a park bench or a shelter. And in the end, a locked building was still the safest place I knew.

As for my new job, I did what I always do, which was look the place up before I went anywhere near it, because this had become routine. Most of what I found was historical or local news articles, but it was enough to tell me what I was going into.

As for Corwin, it without a doubt had the most colorful history of anywhere I have ever worked. It took me about four hours at a back table in an internet café to find all of it, and I wish I had stopped after one, as it was starting to sound more like the start of a bad horror movie. The place could have certainly been the setting for one.

They built Corwin in 1884, and the irony was that they built it to cure people. Every line of that building was somebody’s good idea, and you could see in the architecture that someone took pride in the project.

It had a long central block with a clock tower sitting on top of it, and wings coming off it in staggered ranks either side. Each one stepped back from the last so that every ward would get its share of the morning sun. Tall windows. High ceilings. Airing courts, which are what they called the walled yards where patients were taken out for their hour of exercise. There was a walled garden, a chapel, and even a ballroom.

The whole theory behind the design, according to what I read, was so that light and air could put a broken mind back together again, and men in frock coats believed it hard enough to spend a state fortune proving it.

It was an imposing building that consisted mostly of dark red brick gone black from the weather. Slate roofs with iron cresting along the ridgelines. Carved stone around every window, because somebody in 1884 thought that mattered to the people inside. But according to the internet, by 1910 there were nine hundred patients in a building meant for four hundred.

That was what the light, the air, and the good intentions came to in the end. I read about what happened in those wings hunched over a screen in the corner of that café, trying the whole time to keep my mind off a shower stall at Ashlock. Off the way his hands had felt against my skin, the way his lips had felt at my neck. I remembered it all, every second of it that either kept me awake at night or had me waking up calling his name.

Corwin closed as a hospital in the seventies, the way all of them closed. Then it stood empty for nineteen years with the weather getting into it, before the state came back and did what states do. Which was look at an enormous secure building it already owns and think of a use for it.

So now there is razor wire on Victorian stone. There are cameras bolted into carved masonry, and steel doors hung in openings built for oak. A modern vehicle airlock grafted onto the front of an 1884 entrance hall like something clamped on. Two fences twenty feet apart with a strip of dead ground between them where nothing grows.

Four hundred and six patients. Every one of them found not guilty by reason of insanity or unfit to stand trial, and some moved out of a state prison because whatever they had turned out to be was worse than a sentence.

Patients.

Not inmates, not prisoners. It says so on the front page of their own website, twice.

That was the version of Corwin you got in daylight. The one with a mission statement on it and a photograph of the clock tower taken on a nice day.

The other version took me another two hours to find, and it was all underneath.

The tunnels.

Back then they ran everything through them. The steam heat, the coal for the boilers, the laundry, wing to wing, so that nothing and nobody had to cross the outside courts in winter. But on a more morbid note, they also ran the dead through them. A hospital that admitted six hundred people a year and buried a great many of them didn’t let the living stand at a window and watch the coffins go out of the front door. So, they took them out underground instead, and there was a small brick building at the far end of the grounds that everybody was told was a store.

But according to the records, the tunnels were sealed long before Corwin became a place to house the criminally insane. I didn’t know if my research made me feel better or worse about the job but then, it was only for six weeks. What could go wrong, I thought with a roll of my eyes thinking back to exactly what went wrong with the last job.

Not what… who.

The man whose name I still didn’t know and despite trying, still couldn’t stop thinking about.

Even after I left the café, and long after I got into my new place, which was a rented room above a hardware store. I would like to say I tried not to think about him, I really would, but everything seemed to bring me back to his voice. The way he would say my name. The way he claimed I was his. An insane part of me even felt guilty leaving him back in that place, even though I knew who he was. Knew how dangerous he was. That he had killed people. So why, despite knowing all of this, did I still feel this way about him? A question I was still asking myself on the drive out to Corwin.

I left the small town that you first had to drive through before hitting the open road and then suddenly, it was the clock tower you saw first. Miles out, before you saw anything else. A black spire rising out of the ground like a headstone, sitting against a clear sky like something that had been standing there patiently waiting for me.

Then the wings came up out of the land underneath it, one stepping back from the next, all that dark brick and all those tall windows. For about all of four seconds I found it genuinely beautiful and I understood exactly what those men in 1884 thought they were building.

Then I got close enough to see the wire.

As for the car I was in, if you could even call it that, I was fairly sure the engine was held together with duct tape for how much it rattled. But then, really, what could I expect for six hundred and fifty dollars? A cheap rust bucket bought from a stranger on the internet who wanted cash and didn’t want to talk for longer than handing me the keys after first counting the bills… twice.

It was a Buick older than I was, and I’m sure the color had an appealing name at one time when someone first drove it out of the dealership. But now, it was mainly rust, with the rear wheel well consisting of more body filler than metal. There was also a hole in the exhaust that made it sound like a much more exciting car than it was. It also had a heater that only worked on the highest setting. Oh, and there was a noise from somewhere under the front end that came and went that I have decided, as a medical professional, to treat with rest and observation.

But there was nothing I could do at this point because I didn’t have the money for anything better. Erin Shaw cost nothing, but the room took a deposit and four weeks up front. Because there aren’t many landlords who accept a woman with no rental history and no references unless she puts a great deal of cash on the table and smiles about it. And I wasn’t new to this game.

So, the car got what was left, shy of enough money to fill a tank and ensure I could eat. Which was why I needed this job… desperately.

I pulled into the staff lot at twenty past six on my first morning with my headlights still on and the heater roaring on its only setting. Then I sat there with my hands gripping the steering wheel until my knuckles went white, looking up at the place.

After that, I checked my monitor out of habit. Low, obviously, as nerves burn through me like fuel, and my blood sugar always pays the bill. So, I dug a candy bar out of the glovebox and ate it in two bites in the shadow of a nineteenth-century asylum with razor wire on it and told myself that counted as breakfast.