“It’s done.”

That evening, Ethan called me.

I let it ring twice before I answered, and when I did, his voice came through cold and controlling, the voice of a man who still believed, completely, that he held all the power in the situation.

“Natalie,” he said, “when I get home, you and I are going to have a very serious conversation.” And I felt, hearing it, a strange and enormous calm, because he had no idea — no idea at all — that the home he was threatening to have a conversation in had belonged, for six days now, to a medical residential company, that his key would not work, that his mother’s key would not work, that the entire edifice of control he was speaking from had already, quietly, been dismantled beneath his feet while he lay on a beach.

“Yes,” I replied quietly.