Author's note: Thank you so much for all the review/comments on this! I'm a technological dinosaur and can't work out how to reply to individual comments on here, but I just wanted to say that I do appreciate them!

Also, someone wanted to know where the line of poetry in the last part was from. It's the last line of 'The Hollow Men' by T.S. Elliot.

And I should probably also just warn you that this next part has some self-harm in it.

Part Forty-Five: Cesca

Cesca studies her reflection in the mirror. She'd avoided looking in it as much as possible during the month that she'd spent living in this room, but, today, she forced herself to examine her own features. She was surprised by what she saw. She didn't look like herself anymore. Her face, stripped of make-up and moisturiser, looked strangely bare; her lips seemed pale, her cheeks hollow. Her eyes were rimmed by dark circles and she looked washed out, older somehow. And her hair was a mess. She hadn't bothered brushing it carefully for a while now and there was no such thing as a hairdryer or deep conditioning shampoo in this place.

She sighed and tried to arrange her hair into something resembling a style. Her fingers were shaking as she did so and she couldn't get the parting right, couldn't concentrate on getting it right. There was a lump in her throat, a kind of blockage somewhere in the vicinity of her chest which just wouldn't go away. And she was tired, so, so tired.

Giving up on her hair, she moved away from the mirror and sat down on the bed, hands folded passively. She stared into space, eyes focused on nothing. There was nothing there for them to focus on in this blank whiteness of a room. All that was in here was the hard bed in which she tossed and turned night after night, the bleak little mirror above the equally bleak little sink and a chair by the window. She could sit in the chair, again with hands passively folded, and look out of the window. Not that there was anything to see, just a tiny stone-walled yard, sometimes empty, sometimes filled with women dressed identically to her with the same greasy hair and dry skin.

Cesca had never seen women like these before. They were sharp-eyed and hard-faced, alert to everything around them, always on guard. And they hated her. They thought her posh and stuck-up, but, worse than that, they thought she was a child-molester. Some of them had sons of Jonah's age or younger and they looked at her in disgust, spat at her as she passed them by. Many of them had done things which were far worse, but it seemed as though she had done the thing which was worst of all, had crossed some invisible boundary, had hurt a child.

Sometimes Cesca caught herself wondering if these women were right. Maybe she had hurt him, taken advantage of him. Maybe she had cheated him of his childhood. She'd certainly caused him pain, was still causing him pain now. She'd dragged him into situations no one of his age should be in and she'd forced him to occupy a role which should have been reserved for one much older than he. She loved him with every fibre of her being and she couldn't bear the thought that she had hurt him.

She knew she was hurting her daughter too. Beatrice needed a mother and didn't have one. Every time she thought of the child, the permanent ache in Cesca's chest reached frightening new heights. She knew of course that Beatrice was safe with Jonah, but still, the separation was almost too much for her. She was haunted by the spectre of her daughter, would wake sometimes in the middle of the night convinced that she had heard a baby crying only to be greeted by the cold, empty silence of the cell.

On nights like these, Cesca's thoughts were dark. For the first few nights, she had been filled with a kind of furious desperation, the need to do something, anything, to show herself that she still had control of any kind at all. She began to sneak razor blades into the cell with her, to scrape away at her own flesh, needing to mask the ache in her soul with something more manageable. She revelled in the pain, in a pain which was purely physical. The sight of her own blood running down her arms and her shoulders filled her with a sense of power. She had done this, she had caused this. Even locked away and forgotten as was, she still had the power to cause something.

Of course, they had found the razors, had seen the blood stains, startling and vivid, on the white plastic floor. They'd taken the blades from her and dragged her in to see a psychiatrist. He'd told her things that she already knew; that she was depressed, that she missed her baby. She wanted to scream at him to stop stating the obvious, had to stop herself from falling to her knees and begging him to let her see Beatrice and Jonah. The psychiatrist had put her on drugs and she had gone to great lengths to avoid taking them. She knew that they would calm her down, stop her feeling the aching loneliness which consumed her, but she didn't want to be calm. She wanted to cling to her feelings, however negative, because they were all that she had left now.

Soon enough she calmed down anyway. Instead of being seized by a furious destructive energy, she felt as if someone had smothered her with a damp, heavy blanket and it was holding her down, forcing her to lock away her feelings because she didn't really feel anything anymore, didn't have the energy to do anything anymore. She stopped eating because she didn't see the point and she stopped sleeping because of the nightmares which gripped her everytime she did. She became entirely passive.

Through it all, she clung to images of Jonah from happier times, trying to convince herself that she hadn't hurt him after all by remembering all the moments of happiness they had shared. And she clung to imagined images of her daughter, tried to make herself believe that Beatrice was as happy as she could be, that she was better off without her.

The shadows outside the room were changing now, the sun was moving through the sky towards its midday zenith. Cesca twisted her hands nervously, some of her passivity beginning to dissipate. Today was the day of her trial, the day she would find out exactly how long she had to spend in this place, how long she would be separated from Jonah and Beatrice. If the judge was lenient she could be here for a few more months and if he wasn't then she could be here for years and she wasn't sure she could stand tat. She was reliant upon the kindness of strangers, upon the way in which people she hardly knew would characterize her relationship with Jonah and she was reliant upon the witness statements too, upon Karen Fisher, Adanna, Marcus Kirby…Other than Adanna, none of them were particularly fond of her. Cesca felt a single tear running down her cheek as she imagined a bleak void of a future without Jonah and Beatrice.