“Who are you going to call?” he said, pleased with himself.

I said nothing, because I did not need the phone; the camera in the smoke detector had been recording since before they arrived, and everything they were doing and saying was already somewhere they could not reach.

And when Arthur told me it was my last chance, I looked up into that hidden lens, so that whoever watched it later would see my face and see theirs, and then I said no again, and they did what they did.

I want to tell you that the violence was the worst part.

It was not.

The worst part was Flynn’s face — that small, bored, scornful smile, the smile of a man watching something dull, while his parents broke his wife on the floor of the house she had bought.