Security footage showed a woman matching her description walking into a tattoo parlor in Knoxville. She emerged six hours later with a black serpent coiled up her right arm, its mouth open at her throat. She cut her own hair with sewing scissors in a bus station bathroom—cropped short, bleached white.

Because the voice wasn’t a symptom.

The label put her on “mandatory hiatus.” Her manager, a sharp woman named Delia, drove her to a remote cabin in the Smokies. “No phone,” Delia said. “No social media. Just you and the woods. Find your center.”

“Finally,” it said. “Somewhere quiet to play.” The cabin had no electricity, just a woodstove and oil lamps. For the first three days, Anna Claire wrote in a journal—not the black one, a new one with sunflowers on the cover. She wrote about her mother, who left when she was seven. About the church choir director who touched her knee too long. About the night she swallowed a bottle of her father’s Xanax at fourteen and woke up in a psych ward.

The breaking point came in Nashville.