do you feel safe again? look over your shoulder.
"Where have you been?" Graff demands, reaching out and snatching her by the wrist, hauling her towards the house. There's dirt underneath her nails. "What have you done to your dress? Digging around in the gardens again, aren't you?" You stupid bitch, is what she doesn't say, but they both hear it.
Jaenelle's increasingly strange behaviour--in the context of a normal girl, not her, because everything she does is strange--hasn't gone unnoticed by her family. Her frequent disappearances, sometimes in the middle of the day--and she returns spouting cryptic remarks and remaining coolly distant from her relatives, from her father, whom she continues to insist on calling uncle.
(It's not that they don't really think she's ill--her compensating for not wearing the Jewels, they think, conflated with her high-strung nature--but it's also because even coming from a mentally ill girl, those kinds of things make people wonder...)
She's been caught before, returning from her disappearances, and the acceptance that shadows the quiet fear (from Wilhelmina) or exasperated awe (from Cook), she's taken and strapped to her spine, like a brace for what would come after.
It's just that this time, it's Graff who caught her. And this time, it's reported to Alexandra.
"Jaenelle, we're not doing this to be cruel. You're a sick little girl, and we want to help you get better."
"I'm not sick," Jaenelle said softly, staring straight ahead.
"Yes, you are. You can't tell the difference between make-believe and the real world."
She's silent on the carriage ride, silent as they lead her out towards Briarwood's closed doors, and silent as her family stands around, discussing her with her doctors in hushed, quiet voices. She's silent as one of them takes her hand and guides her down the hall, and she doesn't look back to see her grandmother's pale, drawn face.
But thunder rolls and echoes down the halls in her wake, and all of Briarwood's uncles simultaneously pause.
(italics = excerpts from Daughter of the Blood)