But Garrett and Celina were not frightened, because they did not yet grasp that anything had gone wrong.

In their minds, I was still the broken woman on the floor, still helpless, still theirs; and people like that cannot resist coming to gloat.

Cruelty of their particular kind is not satisfied by the harm itself.

It needs an audience, and it needs the victim’s face, and it needs to say the words out loud — look what happens when you don’t listen — to a person who cannot answer back.

They would come to the hospital not in spite of the danger but because they could not imagine there was any; they would come to enjoy me.