It proceeds to something caring — you shouldn’t have to worry about your phone right now.

It arrives, months later, at a woman who cannot access her own bank account or contact her own father, and who has been taught, gradually, to experience each new restriction as protection rather than imprisonment.

No single step is large enough to trigger alarm.

That is the entire genius of it.

By the time the cage is complete, the person inside it helped build every bar, believing each one was a kindness.

And the cruelest part — the part that broke my daughter far more than the stolen million ever could — is the running commentary that accompanies it: the daily, patient insistence that she is worthless, incapable, lucky to be tolerated, until she comes to hold that verdict about herself more firmly than her captors do, and no longer needs a locked door, because she has become her own jailer.