He had convinced her she was a killer.

He had convinced her that the whole apparatus of the law was hunting her, that stepping into daylight meant handcuffs and a cell and her son growing up knowing what she’d done.

And so even in the hours the door was unlocked — and there were such hours, she admitted, when he forgot, or didn’t bother — she did not run, because there was nowhere to run to that wasn’t worse.

That is how the most effective cages are built.

Not out of locks, which can be picked, but out of a lie so total that the prisoner guards herself, polices her own hope, turns the key from the inside.

Radley had understood something monstrous about human beings: that a person convinced of her own guilt requires very little other restraint.