Not through some failure of intelligence — Camden was not stupid — but through a contempt so settled and so total that it stops examining itself.

He was so certain I was decorative that he never once confirmed it.

He admired the house I had built him and never asked who held the key to the front door, because in his mind I was not the sort of person who could hold a key.

I was part of the furnishings.

And a man who builds nothing, and understands nothing he has been handed, never learns the thing that every real builder knows in her bones: that whoever draws the plans always knows where the master key is hidden.

I did not set out, four years ago, to build myself a weapon.