Everything they had done to me that afternoon had been to save Christopher from a crime he had already committed.

And there is a grim, clarifying logic in that which I have never forgotten, because it explains the escalation, and the escalation is the thing that frightened me most in hindsight.

People do not usually begin by locking a post-surgical woman in a freezing garage.

That is not a first move; it is a last, desperate one.

And the reason my husband and his mother had arrived at so extreme an act, so quickly, was that they were not, by that afternoon, trying to get away with a crime.

They were trying to cover one that had already happened.