When she finished, they sat in the morning light for a while — the specific quality of this office's morning light, which she had now remembered fully, which she had come to every Thursday for eighteen months and which had been the external version of the externalisation project, the spoken complement to the written notebooks.
"The palace worked," Dr. Lata said. "Exactly as you designed it."
"Yes," she said. "I was afraid it wouldn't — that the design was too optimistic, that the situation I was preparing for was hypothetical enough that I was overcorrecting. But—" She paused. "It worked."
"Because you know yourself very well," Dr. Lata said. "You built the palace out of the things that are most essentially you — the books, the herbs, the way you arrange a space. The things that survived the acute dissociation were exactly the things you had put in the palace. The body knew them even when the mind didn't." She paused. "That's not luck. That's the result of a very long process of self-knowledge."
"I was also afraid," she said again. "The entire time. From the moment I started building the palace until the moment I found it was finished — I was afraid every day."
"Fear and self-knowledge are not incompatible," Dr. Lata said. "You've known that for a long time."
"I know it better now," she said.
They worked for an hour. Not the crisis work — there would be crisis work, there would be a lot of it, the processing of what had happened in the bedroom and what had not happened and what the no had meant and what Layla's fall had meant and all of it, all the rooms that were still to be built. They would do that work over months, carefully, in this room, in the specific quality of this morning light. Today they did the beginning of it — the establishing of where she was, the inventory of what had come back and what was still missing, the map of the recovery that was still ahead of her.
