When I wrote the first piece about The Reverie, I came away charmed, and I wrote a warm and admiring column. I told you to go early and tell me what you found. Some of you did what I said. I have spent the time since trying to make my peace with that sentence, and I have not managed it, and I am beginning to think I am not supposed to.

So here is my second piece, the follow-up I went out to Misthollow to report and did not come back from. It is not the one I meant to file and I cannot give you the inside of that room. I have tried, in the days since they brought me out, to find the words, and they are not there. Because everyone who came out talks around it the same way, and I used to think that was because it was too lovely to describe. I know better now. It is not that it cannot be said. Literally, the words do not form in your brain even though you have the memory of your time inside. All I can say is do not go there, it is not what you think and not what they say it is.

Since I cannot write about what I experienced, I will write about what I feel. I am angry, and I intend to put that anger to use, because before I was a cautionary tale and a statistic, I was a reporter, and I intend to be one again.

I re-read my own notebook. I have read what I wrote before I went in, the lines about following the money before the magic, about who paid for that lodge and who moved the Council to hold the ribbon. I was right. I want that on the record, not because being right is worth anything to the people who are still not themselves, but because I was right about a danger lurking in the Whispering Groves and nobody with a badge did a thing about it until my sister published my notes in a newspaper.

Let me tell you what happened while I was inside, as best I have been able to piece it from everyone who was on the outside doing the work. My family looked and worried. A staff reporter at this paper counted names when no office would, printed them, and updated them as best they could. Ordinary people on a neighborhood board built a map and a radius and a timeline out of nothing but worry. That is who found the pattern. That is who found us, even though public officials took the credit. The office whose entire purpose is to manage exactly this closed the premises with a notice, and reviewed, and did not comment on matters under review, and reviewed some more, and moved at the stately, procedural, blameless pace of a body that has decided the worst thing that can happen to it is to be seen moving too fast.

And here is the part I cannot get past, by the time anyone official walked through that door to ask Madame Solace a single question, she was gone. You do not slip out of a place that is being watched. She was not being watched. She was being reviewed, which is a different thing, a slower and gentler and more forgiving thing, and she used every day of it. And because she was being reviewed she is somewhere now that none of us can name, and the office will tell you it does not comment on matters under review.

I am not owed her arrest and I know that. No charge has been filed and I am not going to stand here and pretend she’s guilty when the facts don’t bear that out. But I am owed, and you are owed, an honest accounting of how the woman at the center of all this was given the time and the quiet to be elsewhere. Nobody kept a list of who went in. Nobody required a permit for her to run this place. Nobody moved until the neighbors and a grieving family shamed them into it. And when the moving finally happened, it happened slow and forgiving toward the person who brought all this harm.

I owe some thank-yous and I will not bury them at the bottom in small type. To my sister Bryony, who would not sit still, and to my family, who made the paper print my name and my notebook when sitting quietly would have been so much easier. To Merritt Vance, who counted us when it was not fashionable to and kept the list. To the strangers on a watch board who drew a circle on a map around people they had never met. You are the reason I am at this desk and not still behind that door.

I am home and am well enough to be this angry, which the ward tells me is a good sign. I am going to keep writing for these pages, and in my new awakening I am not going to simply write about wellness. I am going to uncover the truths that people like to keep hidden. If you know who Madame Solace was before this spring, send word to the Whispering Groves desk by owl. I do not plan to let this go and will keep writing about this until it is solved.

Marigold Fenn has returned to the Whispering Groves pages after several weeks unaccounted for. She thanks her family, this newspaper, and the readers who looked for her, and asks that anyone with knowledge of the former proprietor of the Misthollow lodge write to the desk by owl. Correspondence will be held in confidence.