Two weeks after Zintka disappeared, Antonina (then called Anne Fayeweather) was working in the library when her friend Stencil began mocking the matrons with blasphemous jokes. Superintendent Malvina Dent erupted, attacking Stencil. Antonina froze in fear and failed to defend her friend. When Jose Luis brought the leather straitjacket, Antonina began laughing hysterically from terror, drawing attention to herself. The nurses subdued her, and she was sentenced to ten days alone in the attic crawl space, custom-fitted into a pregnancy straitjacket.

Antonina reflects that the wards outnumbered the staff five to one and could have overpowered them, but each girl chose self-preservation: better her than me. In the attic, she suffered delirium and read graffiti from prior victims, realizing she was inside an ongoing horror inflicted on many women. Nurse Elaine, sympathetic but cowardly, secretly loosened her straitjacket but refused to do more.

Three days into her confinement, Antonina's water broke. She experienced overwhelming joy at the birth of her healthy son, holding him on her chest. The nurses pressured her to surrender him, but she refused. She suspects she was drugged into a deep sleep; when she woke, the staff told her the baby had died and been sent to Blue Mound Cemetery. Antonina knew they were lying—this is the moment she became a witch.

After a struggle and an injection, Antonina escaped through the back door wearing Nurse Jonquil's coat, intending to find police. A tornado descended; she ran, bleeding, until she reached town. There, fearful and filthy, she realized no one would believe her against the powerful Home, whose abuses the townspeople preferred to ignore. She concludes that the Home stole her baby and tried to destroy her conviction that he lives—a war waged against unwed mothers, ongoing still. She holds on to what she knows: she gave birth to a healthy son, and they took him.