I sat down slowly on the cold slate, my back against the lowest shelf of the wine racks, and I did the only useful thing available to me, which was to refuse to panic.

Panic burns the oxygen you need for thinking.

I breathed slowly and I began, in the dark, to make an inventory.

A man who will lock a woman in a cellar to end a conversation about an electric bill is a man who has something at the other end of that electrical draw he cannot afford to have audited.

That was not a thought that frightened me, down there in the cold.

It was the first entry in a column I already knew how to total.