Beatrice took the prescription bottle from my discharge bag and put it in her pocket.

And then the two of them moved me — not to the couch a few feet away, but out of the warm house entirely, past our bright kitchen and the framed photograph from our wedding day, and into the unheated garage, and they set me down on the bare concrete floor, and they took my medication with them, and they shut the heavy steel door, and I heard the deadbolt turn.

“A few hours out here on your own,” Christopher said, before the door closed, “will do wonders for your perspective.”

“What am I supposed to think about,” I said, “alone, in the dark, on the floor?”

“Think about the papers,” he said.

“And how much easier your life gets the moment you sign them.”