She sits down in the van in silence; she's never known herself to get this deep into a mess. She knows better than that. She's divorced with an allegedly grown up daughter, for fuck's sake. She's forty-nine years old. She knows the system. She's seen it so many times in her life that she should have known better than to be such an utter moron.

But she's here. The girl driving with the wavy purple-ish hair jabbers on, but the British part of her really just wants the girl to shut up and leave her in peace to suffer in silence. She seems nice enough, of course, but patience is something that tends to wear thin when one is somewhere they would rather not be.

Before she knows it, she finds herself in a room with three sets of bunk beds, silent and lost and wishing she had never come to New bloody York in the first place. The other women here wear khakis rather than the orange she finds herself in. She looks at a machine in the corner and realises immediately that the woman in the lower bunk has had at least one heart attack in here. "Don't worry," she smiles. "You'll get out of the orange when you're assigned your bunk."

She laughs and replies, "Believe me, it's no worse than those awful raspberry scrubs I was stuck with for years."

"You're a nurse?" comes a voice from the top bunk, a young woman with wild tainted blonde hair.

"Surgeon."

The girl laughs and answers back, "Shit. Remind me not to get on the wrong side of you. You might gut me like a fucking fish." Unnerved, she resumes unpacking her bunk and making the covers up as the girl hops down. "Nichols," she holds out her hand. "Nicky."

"Serena," she replies.

"Yeah, everyone goes by their last names in this shit hole."

"Campbell."

"You English?"

"Well spotted," Serena impatiently retorts, finding she's not much in the mood for small talk. Or talking at all for that matter. She wants her best friend and her daughter back, or at least to know when she gets to see them. She wants her ex-husband so she can scare him until he sees the mess he started a year ago. But he won't see it, and she knows that, but the satisfaction might be enough for her. He's ruined everything. She's only relieved that she is the one who ended up here and not Elinor. As intelligent (usually) and lovable (when she's not throwing a hissy fit) as Elinor is, prison is not an environment that Serena can visualise her only child living in.

The older woman pipes up with her deep throaty voice, "Hey, Campbell! You don't get anywhere in this place daydreaming. That might do you in your cushy little lady doctor job but it ain't gonna wash here."

Serena turns around and glares at the woman, her arms folded across her chest. "And you are?"

"Demarco."

"Well, Ms. Demarco. I did not get through seven years of medical training and a Harvard MBA by daydreaming. I got where I did through working my arse off my whole life." She doesn't say a word about her personal life, about her daughter or her parents or her ex-husband. She may have had a good work life but her personal life still is an utter mess. Demarco looks slightly surprised by what Serena has said, and Nicky is wearing an ill-disguised smirk. "And as far as me being a 'little lady doctor,' it's something I've always refused to be. Director of Surgery and CEO is more my style, thanks."

Demarco shares a look of amusement with the cancer-stricken woman in the next bunk. "Ignore her," says the woman, her voice quite accented. "She knows not where the line between funny and rude lies. I'm Rosa."

"What happened to surnames only?" Serena raises an eyebrow.

"Fuck 'em. What they gonna do? Kill me twice?" The remark makes Serena smile, and she sees instantly the same thing she's seen every day of her career – people are people. Nothing more. No matter what they've done, who they are or where they come from, as she once said to Antoine Malick, a patient is a patient and a doctor is a doctor – a person is just a person. And she sees the dynamics and the personalities, reminded that humanity lies within this building, possibly more concentrated and purer than she has ever experienced.

She turns to Rosa and says, "You're the hard arse around here, aren't you?"

A laugh from Nicky and Demarco distracts her. "You've not met Red yet, have you?" giggles Nicky. "Or Chapman. Don't be fooled by that one's cute little face. She beat the fuck outta Pennsatucky."

"Sounds a bit like where I used to work," chuckles Serena. "Sacha Levy punched Michael. Twice. Silly man. Though that stupid American was sniffing around his wife a lot," she adds as an afterthought, making up her bunk. "Oddly, I miss that idiot at the moment." She's allowing her filter to fail, reminiscing about Michael Spence and his penchant for making trouble. "Michael Spence. A moron if ever there was one. I mean, seriously, he's an idiot. Taking three months leave...taking the piss, more like," she rants as only Michael knows how to make her rant, repeating her feelings from that day just before Christmas when he had taken one step to far with Sacha and Guy.

"Wait, Michael Spence?" Nicky halted her. "He's the dude who fucked that senator's wife. Hotshot doctor, can't keep it in his pants."

Serena laughed at Nicky's description – she had never met the man and had him down to a tee. "Got it in one. Just count yourself lucky you've never been in the confines of AAU with the man."

"AAU?" repeats Demarco, an expression of annoyance upon her face; it begins to occur to Serena that she is in a different kind of environment than she is used to. These people are not British, and probably have little to no experience of the NHS or its setup, and therefore would not know what AAU is.

Serena sighs. "AAU. Acute Admissions Unit. Or Hell. Whichever you prefer."

"Please!" scoffs Nicky. "Getting paid a surgeon's salary every month? You don't even know what Hell is."

"You'd be surprised," Serena says airily. "Money isn't everything, you know. If your body turns against you, you're in Hell."

"I can vouch for that," declares Rosa.

"Or your mind," adds Serena. "Some of the people I've had to send up to Psych have been begging for death." It's a strange notion, the realisation that her freedom has been stripped from her. For the next nine months, she is at the disposal of the State of New York, and she has to live by the strict rules of Litchfield Prison. She hasn't lived by anyone's rules bar her own since she had left her parents' home. It feels bizarre and long-forgotten to her. "Never underestimate the value of your health. Money and power come second. Christ, if I'd remembered that, I wouldn't be in this God damn fucking forsaken place," she rants away, mostly to herself by this point.

Serena is not a great user of coarse language, but situations like this one are the exception for her. The only other person she has ever really sworn at is Edward, her ex-husband and the bane of her life. He is the reason she is here in this nightmare. She will blame him. In all honesty, he is the reason for most of her nightmarish situations, whether it be divorce, being cheated on or a life juggling her way through working as a leading consultant and doing her best as a single parent with little to no real help from him. Whose fault can it be, if not Edward Campbell's?

She throws her bed into shape in a bad-tempered fashion, using her skills of observation to recreate perfectly what the other inmates have achieved. She knows not why they make their beds this way, but she trusts that there is a valid reason for it.

"One more thing," Demarco pipes up in her low tone; Serena looks at her and sees the iron skin she's going to have to develop to survive here. "Don't tell the whole prison you're a doctor, if you want peace and quiet."

Serena sighs and climbs onto her bunk, aching from the drive in that beat-up old minibus. This is going to be fun.