She can’t get away (she is still unable to walk) and she can’t defend herself. As time ticks down, the threats getting more and more blatant and becoming a promise, Jane knows that, trapped in her hospital bed, she has very limited time to find out who is wanting to kill her. She has a popular boyfriend so immediately Jane assumes that anyone who might want to kill her must be connected to him. Her friends are all extremely wealthy, the daughter of a famous person or both. Jane is popular – one of the very ‘in’ crowd at her school.

Unfortunately for Jane, the more than no one believes her, the more hysterical and crazy sounding she gets, rendering people less likely to even consider believing her. Her mother calls in a top psychiatrist who agrees and Jane is frustrated as no one believes her. However her mother and nurse think these events are just hallucinations that spur her on to regaining use of something (voice, arms etc) and that they’re not real – just figments of her imagination to help her get better. When a voice on the other end of the phone threatens to kill her, Jane is forced to realise that her being run over was no accident – she was run down and the culprit is someone she knows, probably someone that is coming to visit her. As abilities begin to come slowly back to her, such as being able to speak or move her hands, they do so by being triggered by traumatic events – a message written in the bathroom mirror of her hospital room, a threatening phone call. Jane is paralyzed for the moment with doctors hopeful that she will regain full use of her limbs in due course, once she has recovered. She was out with her friends at a party to celebrate the beginning of the long weekend, but Jane doesn’t know why she left the party and was walking, alone, when she was hit. When Jane wakes up in hospital, she has no recollection of being run over by a car and left for dead by the side of the road.

Rosebush by michele jaffe