And then the door closed, and the bolt slid home, and I was alone on the freezing concrete of my own garage, unable to stand, my phone on the kitchen counter on the other side of a locked steel door, the controls for the main garage door far out of my reach.

They had, they believed, made me completely powerless.

That was the entire theory of the thing.

Hurt her, isolate her, take away her relief, and she will sign.

They had thought it through carefully.

They had simply gotten one detail, one small blinking detail near the top of the storage shelves, catastrophically wrong.