"That's good. Keep it up—make sure you spend at least half an hour outdoors every day, and it's best if you can exercise, like running, and work up a sweat. As for the medication, take it step by step. If you don't feel any discomfort, you can move up to the normal dosage this week."

Dr. Adams kept a close eye on Fiona Bennett as he spoke. After a moment's thought, he asked, "Do you... often feel absent-minded?"

"It's not too bad."

"Do you experience hallucinations? For example, auditory hallucinations—hearing someone talk to you when you're alone, or hearing a third person's voice during a phone call, things like that. Or visual hallucinations—seeing things that your rational mind tells you can't be real?"

"No." Fiona Bennett denied it firmly.

"Are you sure? Since you're here, it's best to tell me about any unusual experiences you might have."

Fiona Bennett hesitated for a moment and said, "Well, I'm not sure if it counts as a hallucination. I have a good friend, a college classmate named Susan Wright, who died in an accident years ago. Sometimes I see her—it's like an illusion, as if she's still alive."

Dr. Adams's expression grew serious. "Can you describe the situation in detail?"

"It's not exactly that I see her. It's more like a very light dream, or a deep, heavy memory."

"Can you see her features clearly? Like her face, her clothes, or does she talk to you?"

Fiona Bennett shook her head. "It's just a feeling, not that specific."

"Does it happen often? Has it gotten worse recently?"

Fiona Bennett shook her head again.

"When you came in just now, did you have that feeling? Did you feel absent-minded, like you saw your classmate?"

Fiona Bennett hesitated, wondering how to answer, weighing her options in her mind.

"I was a bit absent-minded just now. Suddenly thought of my classmate."

"Did you think of her, or did you actually see something?"

"I thought of her," Fiona Bennett said.

As a medically trained student, she understood the basic difference between thinking of something and actually seeing it. Being absent-minded and thinking about something could still be categorized as depression, but actually seeing it would be schizophrenia. She had to be careful about what to say and what not to say. She didn't want to be diagnosed as truly mentally ill, whereas depression was now a common urban illness.

Dr. Adams chatted with Fiona Bennett a bit more, then prescribed her medication for the week.

Fiona Bennett took the prescription to the cashier to pay, then went to the pharmacy to pick up her medicine. It was still venlafaxine, the antidepressant she had been prescribed before, with no additional drugs. While picking up her medication, Fiona Bennett received a call from Dr. Adams, asking her to come back again. He said he had thought it over and decided it would be safer to add another medication. Fiona Bennett figured it was probably because of the talk about hallucinations that made Dr. Adams want to add more meds. Was he planning to prescribe her antipsychotics, like perphenazine?

Carrying her medicine, Fiona Bennett headed back. In the outpatient lobby, she spotted someone who shouldn't have been there.

The outpatient lobby of the mental health center was nowhere near as crowded as a regular hospital—almost empty, really. Anyone walking through was easy to spot. Fiona Bennett hadn't even stepped out of the small corridor leading to the pharmacy when she saw Frank Bishop walking across the lobby with another doctor from the hospital. Shouldn't he be at work at this hour? Fiona Bennett wondered. Maybe he was helping someone out, introducing them to a doctor. Unless absolutely necessary, she now dreaded running into Frank Bishop, so she had no intention of greeting him and waited until he had passed before coming out of the corridor.

But this wasn't like him. Usually, if a doctor needed a colleague's help, a phone call would suffice. How urgent did it have to be for him to take time off during work hours? Doctors don't get time off easily. Maybe it was because she'd been reading too much of Gabriel Adams's textbooks lately, but at that moment, Fiona Bennett couldn't help recalling a note Gabriel Adams had jotted down in his copy of "Criminology." These little notes scattered throughout the book were all extra insights from the professor, drawn from years of criminal investigation experience.

In the preparatory stage of a crime, a perpetrator's behavior often becomes abnormal. This abnormality might not be obvious when compared to the general public, but compared to their own usual behavior, the difference is clear. For example, buying things they normally wouldn't, saying things they normally wouldn't, going places they normally wouldn't, and so on.

Thinking of this, Fiona Bennett watched the direction Frank Bishop had gone for a while, then followed. She kept her distance, not wanting her husband to see her. After a few steps, she saw Frank Bishop stop at the inpatient registration window, where the accompanying doctor spoke to the staff inside on his behalf.

Then Frank Bishop began filling out some forms.

Fiona Bennett clutched her bag of medicine, backing away step by step, then turned and left—first walking quickly, then breaking into a run, dashing out of the hospital and jumping into a taxi. She thought of Dr. Adams's call asking her to come back, and her hair stood on end. Frank Bishop was going to have her committed to a psychiatric hospital!

If someone is truly ill and a direct family member signs the consent, the psychiatric hospital will admit them even if the patient objects. And she had been seeing a psychiatrist for several weeks—introduced by Frank Bishop himself—and had just confessed to some symptoms suggestive of schizophrenia!

Fiona Bennett was so regretful she wanted to slap herself.

For Frank Bishop, for the person who killed Susan Wright and Gabriel Adams, what could be a more perfect solution than having her locked up in a psychiatric hospital? That way, no matter what she found out, what clues she planned to give the police, or whom she suspected, who would believe her?

You don't need blood to kill. Maybe for Frank Bishop, this was the perfect way to honor years of marriage—let her stay in the hospital and get treatment, take more meds until her mind was so foggy she couldn't even think of revenge. And if she could still remember, that just meant she wasn't cured—so back in for more treatment!

Sitting in the taxi, Fiona Bennett's heart was pounding as if it would leap out of her chest. If Dr. Adams's previous patient hadn't canceled, if she'd entered the consultation room half an hour earlier and left half an hour earlier, if she hadn't happened to see Frank Bishop in the lobby, she'd already have been dragged off to the isolation ward by a bunch of nurses.

"Where are you going? Say something!" the driver shouted at her.

"Oh, sorry." Fiona Bennett gave him her home address.

"Please hurry, sir, I'm in a rush."

When they arrived at her building, Fiona Bennett asked the driver to wait for her a moment.

She didn't know how much time she had left, but the sooner the better. She dragged a large suitcase out of the storage room, threw in all the case-related copies and books from the small room, stuffed in some everyday clothes, gathered all her IDs and bank cards, and closed the suitcase. She left a note on the table—"Don't look for me"—then, dragging the suitcase in one hand and carrying a desk board that wouldn't fit in the case in the other, she got back in the taxi and told the driver to head to Ruihong New Town. When she'd gone to the real estate agency that day, the agent who rented the place to " Daisy Hamilton " had given Fiona Bennett a business card out of habit, so she dug it out and called.

"I need to rent a place—price doesn't matter, one room, two rooms, three rooms, anything is fine, but I need to move in today. Do you have anything?" Fiona Bennett asked.

"I have a really nice two-bedroom, and I have the keys right here. When would you like to see it?"

"In twenty minutes."

2

Fiona Bennett checked the address—yes, this was the place.

Even though she already knew a bit about William Williams, she was still surprised when she saw the security guard use the intercom to announce a visitor. To her, a complex like Ruihong New Town was already quite upscale, but this place was clearly a level above that—maybe more.

After her escape, Frank Bishop had called her several times. She didn't answer, and eventually just hung up on him. Frank Bishop sent a text: "What's wrong? Did something happen?" Fiona Bennett was so angry she could grind her teeth, and replied, "You know what you've done. Heaven is watching." After that, nothing—no more texts or calls from Frank Bishop, no explanations, no threats, no apologies, no attempts to make her stay. After all these years of marriage, it was as if it had all been a dream. Fiona Bennett gradually came to her senses and broke down in tears, crying from night till morning, sleeping when her tears dried up, waking and crying again, over and over. She had completely lost her sense of direction for what to do next. Looking for William Williams was just a continuation of her previous plan out of habit—what would it change if she found him? She had hit a dead end investigating Gabriel Adams's death, and the tiny clues she had couldn't point her to the next step. If she could get any leads from William Williams, it would only be a small supplement to the old Susan Wright case—there was no way to make a breakthrough through him. Only if she had key evidence, something the police couldn't ignore, or even a complete chain of evidence, could she convince the unyielding Officer Leonard Carter. If this was a journey, the distance between where she stood now and the finish line was like a thousand mountains and rivers. Even if, by some miracle, she could leap over all those obstacles and stand tall before Officer Leonard Carter, the accusation of mental illness would be enough to strip most of the power from her evidence. Who would take a mentally ill person's words seriously?

Fiona Bennett couldn't think of a good solution. She just gritted her teeth and kept following the path she'd set, all the way to the end. Maybe the road would appear when she reached the mountain, maybe the boat would straighten itself out when it reached the bridge. This time, she wasn't going to give up until the very end.