In the summer of one of those years, after she broke a plate, he locked her in the coop overnight as a punishment, and over time that shed became the place he kept her.

She survived it the way people survive unspeakable things, with the small terrible ingenuity of the desperate, and I will not describe those survivals in detail, because she survived them so that she would never again have to, and it is not my place to put them on display.

It is enough to say that she endured, and that she should never have had to, and that not one person was left on that isolated farm to hear her or help her, because he had spent years making sure of it.

Chapter 8 — The Highway