He did it patiently, and he did it in my own voice, which is the cruelest part — sending messages from my accounts to my own parents, telling them I was fine, I was busy, I didn’t want to talk, so that the silence between us looked, from their side, like my choice.

My mother spent six months believing her daughter had pulled away from her, and grieving it, and blaming herself, when the truth was that her daughter was being sealed off behind a wall of forged messages precisely so that she could be hurt without witnesses.

That is how these things work.

They do not start with a broken bone.

They start with the quiet, systematic removal of every person who might have stood between you and the harm — until you look up one day and find that the whole world has been narrowed down to the people hurting you, and you cannot remember how to reach anyone else.

The single number I still knew by heart, the one I dialed from Amanda’s cheap phone, was the rope they had not managed to cut.