A child who has been manipulated does not know she has been manipulated.

She does not have the words for it, or the frame.

What she has instead is a terrible, lonely certainty that she has failed, that she was given a rule and could not keep it, given a job and did it wrong, and that whatever went wrong is therefore her fault.

That is the cruelest part of what was done to Fiona, crueler than the cold floor: she had been made to believe that her own suffering was a punishment she had earned by not being good enough.

And a child left alone with that belief carries it for years, into adulthood, sometimes for a whole life, the deep buried conviction that love is a prize you win by obeying, and that when you are hurt it is because you failed to obey well enough.