Jack rolled his eyes at his brother.
“Oh yeah,” Jack said, and the brothers shared a laugh.
“Mom,” Penny said to Grace. “There’s a football game I want to watch on the telly later. Can we go to the shopping center this morning instead?”
Grace was about to say sure, as the day was remarkably under-scheduled, but Ryan had keyed in on several curiosities.
“First off, it’s May,” he said. “And football season is over. Second, ‘telly’？ And third, ‘shopping center’？ Do you mean ‘the mall’？”
Penny rolled her eyes at her brother. Insolent being, her look said.
“It’s real football, not dumb American football, dummy. Liverpool is playing Man City and I want to watch. Second, it is a telly, and okay, the mall, whatever. You say ‘potaaato,’ I say ‘potahhhto,’ but you understand me perfectly well, don’t you, because you’re not a complete idiot?”
Grace dropped the mail she’d been sorting onto the counter. Normally, she’d issue some sort of rebuke to keep the sibling peace, but she was too stunned at Penny’s speech—how quickly the words spilled out of her mouth, the perfection of her accent.
Arthur didn’t miss a beat as he moved a mouse cake from the pan onto Penny’s plate. “’Ere ya go, luv,” he said with a jovial accent, more Chim-Chimminy than Beatles. “And make sure you put your wand away next time. I sat on the couch and that thing turned my butt into cottage cheese.” He gave his butt cheeks a squeeze with a free hand and bounded off with a smile and laugh. But Grace wasn’t laughing, and neither were Jack or Ryan.
“You’re so silly, Dad,” Penny said.
With that, Arthur’s smile faded. She always called him Daddy. Maybe this new accent was her way of moving into a different phase of their relationship; maybe some kind of maturing and distancing had just taken place. Quickly regaining his composure, Arthur slipped right back into character and asked Penny if she was going to buy new trainers at the shopping center. Penny answered that she didn’t need them, like he hadn’t made a joke at all.
* * *
“She talked like that all day,” Grace said to Dr. McHugh. “Didn’t break character once. And she watched that soccer game—sorry, football match—from start to end, riveted as could be, cheering for Liverpool like her life depended on it. When I went to her room before bed, I kissed her forehead like I always did and said, ‘Goodnight, Penny.’ She just looked at me like I was crazy and said, ‘Mum, it’s me. It’s Ruby.’”
“In the accent?” McHugh asked.
“Yes, in the accent. It continued the next day, too. She had all these new words I didn’t know she knew. Knackered. Cheeky. Mate. Bloody. Phrased things just like a British person might say them.”
“What did Arthur say about it?”
“He wasn’t concerned at all. He thought it was just imaginative play, probably inspired by the Harry Potter books. He told me not to worry.”
“So at this point you hadn’t met Eve?”
“No, both Eve and Chloe came later.”
Mitch took out a small black notebook and jotted something down.
“I need you to believe in this, Dr. McHugh.”
“Please, call me Mitch.”
“Okay then, Mitch. I need you to believe in us, in the diagnosis. Eve, or some other alter, is responsible for what happened to Rachel. Not Penny. My daughter doesn’t belong in prison, potentially for the rest of her life.”
“You know if she’s found not guilty by reason of insanity that the plea won’t prescribe a limit to her stay here. It could be five years, ten, or decades. The mandate would be that she’d stay hospitalized until she’s deemed safe to be released out into the public. I could be gone, and Penny could stay locked up here long after my departure, longer even than a possible prison sentence.”
A chill raced up Grace’s spine.
“As I understand the law, Penny can’t just be punished for having a mental illness. If she gets proper treatment, she could be released.”
“You’re talking integration,” said Mitch, referring to the therapeutic practice of bringing all dissociative parts of Penny’s personality into one sense of self—in essence, killing Eve, Chloe, and Ruby. “For that we’re going to really need to understand her past. Tell me, how did Penny and her mother reconnect?”
Color flushed his cheeks, and Grace realized that her pained expression might have caused him some embarrassment. “Birth mother,” he corrected. “Rachel. How did they reconnect?”