I crossed the little room, and I knelt down, and I gathered my wife’s frail body up against my chest — she weighed almost nothing, and that nearly broke me — and I stood, and I lifted her, and I carried her out of that dark closet where they had hidden her away like something shameful.

I carried her down the hallway.

I carried her through the beautiful, hollow, stolen house.

And I carried her out through the front door — the front door, not the back — and into the light of the afternoon sun, which fell warm and gold across her upturned face, the first real sunlight she had felt in longer than I wanted to know.

I set her gently into the passenger seat of my car, and I buckled her seatbelt myself, carefully, the way you would buckle in something precious.

“Where are we going?” she whispered.