the mischief irretrievably done
‘… that latent process of unconscious preparation often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done,’
Context
The book that snaps Lenz to himself: a large-print William James found behind an Ennet bookshelf, and the line about "the mischief is irretrievably done" that catches him mid-relapse-anatomy. The recovery house as an accidental site of reckoning — the addict caught out by a nineteenth-century psychologist's sentence about the damage already, unknowingly, prepared.