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From the hospital-room window, I could see the top turrets of Vanessa’s house, slate-shingled and ornate, and I looked at them often, imagining that they belonged to a castle where an ogre or a princess lived. I did not know then that the house was Vanessa’s, or that I would live there for a time, drawn into her chimerical life until the moment of her violent and deliberate death. While I was in the hospital, I could only fantasize, dreaming of fairy-tale characters whose adventures and romances were glorious alternatives to my own dreary regime of medications and cognitive behavior