There is only a structure of control, dressed up to look like a home.

What Ethan and Patricia and Megan had built, and drawn me into, and nearly kept me in, was not a family.

It was a cage — an elegant one, a comfortable one, appointed with expensive sofas and a grand dining table and a chandelier over it all, but a cage nonetheless, with bars I had mistaken for walls and a lock I had mistaken for a front door.

For two years I had lived inside it, telling myself it was a home, working to be welcome in it, decorating a nursery inside it, because I could not yet see that the beautiful furnishings were camouflage, and that the whole gilded structure existed for one purpose, which was to hold me.