For thirty years, Margaret Holloway had lived in a world where her own words were treated as symptoms. At seventy-two, she sat by the narrow, barred window of Riverside State Psychiatric Hospital, watching the autumn leaves drift down like silent confessions. In the ward, the narrative was fixed: Margaret was confused, her memories were delusions, and the house she claimed to own was a ghost of a fractured mind. Her hands, mapped with the blue veins of age, trembled as she folded a piece of paper she had kept hidden for three decades—a deed with her name typed neatly at the top: Margaret Anne Holloway. Owner.

They said she was lost in a fog of her own making. Margaret knew better. She knew that the fog had been manufactured by someone else. And on a morning thick with actual mist, before the nurses had finished their morning rounds, Margaret Anne Holloway did the unthinkable. She walked out of the life they had built for her.

Thirty years earlier, Margaret had been a woman of quiet precision. As a school librarian in Millbrook, Pennsylvania, she lived a life governed by the Dewey Decimal System and the gentle creak of the floorboards in her two-story Victorian on Hawthorne Lane. It was a house of stained glass and deep shadows, inherited from parents who had taught her that a home was a sanctuary. She had painted the kitchen a specific shade of eggshell blue; she knew the exact spot on the third step that groaned underfoot.