The Glass Cage

Prologue

There is a particular weight to a blanket laid over you by someone who believes they are saving your life.

Wool. Police-issue, scratchy at the throat. It comes down over my shoulders from behind, and a hand presses it flat, twice, the way you settle a child. I let it stay. I have learned to let kind hands finish what they start.

“You’re safe now,” the woman says. She has a flashlight and a voice trained to go soft. “It’s over. You’re safe.”

Red light slides across the glass and away. Slides back. There are more cars in the drive tonight than have ever come up it at once, and every one of them is here for me—to carry me out of this, to wrap me in wool, to ask me nothing I can’t answer with my hands shaking.

Somewhere behind me a man is saying my name. Then another man, saying it differently. Two voices, both certain, both wrong. I don’t turn around. A rescued woman doesn’t turn around. She looks at the ground and lets them sort it out between them.

The woman with the flashlight crouches to my level. She wants me to know she sees me. They always want that.

“Can you tell me your name?”

I can. I give it to her small, broken in the middle, the way I have given it for years. Her face does the thing faces do. It tips. It softens. It closes around the story she walked in already holding.

Poor thing. Look what he did to her.

Behind us the forest is black and the pond is blacker, and the house stands lit above the water like a lantern someone forgot to put out. You can see straight through it. Every room. Nothing to hide.

The blanket is warm now. My own shoulders have warmed it.

“You’re safe,” she says again.

I let her believe she’s right.