It is enough to say that the gatehouse became her whole world, that Radley brought cheap groceries twice a week and locked her in behind him, and that his one mercy — the only one — was the photographs of Percy.

The ones Ellard had taken at the park and texted every month.

“I lived on those pictures,” Sidonie said, looking at the wall of them.

“I stayed in the dark because I thought it was the only way to keep my son from having a murderer for a mother.”

What I will say about those years — because it is the thing that most needs saying, the thing that keeps a rescue like this one from being simple — is that the door was not the cage.

There were months, Sidonie told them later, when the padlock was almost beside the point, because the real prison was the thing Radley had built inside her head.