The clinic was more like a college dormitory than a prison, but Bliss could bet that the windows at Case Western weren't built from two inches of shatterproof acrylic you couldn't break with a sledgehammer. In a past life, she had been sent to a place not unlike this one, and she could still remember the horror of that experience: the shackles and the tests, the buckets of cold water poured on her head during her ravings. The mental hospital looked innocuous enough, but even so, when Bliss arrived in the afternoon, she could not help shuddering. The lobby was peaceful and cheerful, decorated in soothing pastel colors, and patients were allowed to wear their own clothes - none of that shuffling in hospital gowns and slippers. There were no bars on the windows, there were no armed guards at the gates, and none of the nurses were named Ratched. It was a small four-story building located on a pretty hillside in a sleepy Cleveland suburb. Bernadette's Psychiatric Clinic had taken great pains not to look like a mental asylum, to distance itself from the negative connotation of institutional sanatoriums: nightmarish loony bins where crazies were locked up and caged, left to sit in a mess of their own filth.
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