Eleanor Mary Lucas was dressed in white – a white medical gown beneath a white towelling robe. They’d given her pristine white slippers, and her toes, with their misshapen nails, clawed out from the end. After multiple medical tests and hours of police evidence gathering, she’d finally been allowed to wash with the help of a nurse. But the grime was still ringed around her neck, her wrists, her knuckles. Looking at her, sitting in the vinyl-covered chair beside her bed, it wasn’t obvious that Eleanor had spent nearly two thirds of her life locked away. Though it was clear that part of her wasn’t there.

‘No bother, my love,’ the nurse had said of the dirt. ‘It’ll come off in good time.’ Eleanor hadn’t known what she’d meant by that. No amount of time was good in her mind. She’d sat bent forward in the bath, watching as the water lapped at her veined and naked body, rippling over skin that looked unfamiliar in the daylight. She wondered who she was, if she was the same person or a new person. A third incarnation of someone she’d forgotten. The nurse, elbow-deep, had encouraged Eleanor to hold the sponge, soap it up, to wash away everything. Her body burned and stung from the bubbles, and then she laughed. She laughed so much she made waves. She wasn’t free at all.

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Of course there were questions, a lifetime of those, and Eleanor had to have her lawyer present when they were asked. She didn’t even know she had a lawyer, she realised, as the words floated around her.

‘I don’t know,’ she said, when they asked if she’d killed him. Her eyeballs felt huge.

Shafts of sunlight sliced between the blind slats. In the brightness, she saw a silhouette of the hammer. The big heavy hammer he’d brought down to fix the pipes with. She hadn’t waited to find out if he’d actually died from the blows, but he must have because he hadn’t chased after her. And there was all that blood.

I am as bad as bad can be…

He’d given her enough movies to watch over the years. She knew what it was to be evil. She’d told the police about the films, recounted how she thanked her lucky stars that she was safe in there, out of harm’s way. She told them about the little gifts and the trips out too – the places he’d taken her when she’d been good. She smiled when she remembered the butterfly in the jar, but they didn’t smile – the doctors and the police. They just sat there, swallowing, breathing, unmoving. She spoke about the bits she could remember and then, when they asked her a question about one thing, she’d get sidetracked and tell them all about another. Her mind went everywhere. Like that butterfly set free. If it hadn’t already been dead.

‘I read books too,’ she said in response to Why do you think he did it? because she couldn’t answer that. When they asked about how he treated her, she told them about the mouse in the cage and how some of her teeth had fallen out. Did you ever go hungry? Did he hurt you? Did he force himself on you sexually? Did anyone see you when you went out on trips? Why didn’t you scream for help?

‘Goose is dead now,’ she said, staring at the feet of people she didn’t recognise. But they didn’t know what that meant, that she was sad because of it.

‘Why now, Eleanor? Why didn’t you overcome him before?’

They didn’t understand. Didn’t understand how she could never, and would never, hurt him. She couldn’t tell them why – that she loved him with all her heart. Then that voice in her head again, ringing noises inside her skull just as the hammer must have rung loud in his: Fucking kill him! Do it!

But she hadn’t.

Had she?

Those moments of her life, those few seconds, wrapped up in the years (she thought it must have been many, many, many years by now) blurred into what seemed an even longer stretch of time. Her eyes had refused to see the blood; her ears were deaf to the crack of bone and core-deep moans coming from him. Even her skin was numb to the fresh wind tunnelling down to greet her, to tempt her out. Blowing her hair.

And then there was that girl. That beautiful, strange girl. Setting the butterfly free.

Doing what she’d never been able to do all those years.

Where had she come from?

Eleanor stared up at the ceiling to make the tears go back in, then she looked around the hospital room, blinking. She pined for the jaundiced glow of the flickering bulb above her mattress, the tiny fridge that hummed her to sleep, the steady drip of the wobbly tap and the comforting clank of the locks when he came to visit, making her tummy go tight with anticipation. She couldn’t bring herself to look out of the hospital window yet, because she knew it was filled with the whole world. And that was way too big for someone like her.