When she tried anyway, one afternoon, to reach her mother, he destroyed the phone and struck her for the first time.

After that he stopped letting visitors onto the property at all.

He fired the last of the farmhands, so that there was no one left to see.

He intercepted her mother’s letters and burned them in the fireplace.

And then, over months, he began to use the most basic thing of all as his instrument of control: he decided she had to earn every meal through labor, and that any mistake meant going without, sometimes for days.

This is the part I find hardest to say plainly, so I will say it once and move on.