He asked her, at each step, what she wanted — did she want the authorities called tonight or did she want to wait; did she want him in the room while he made the calls or did she want the door open and him on the other side of it; was there anyone she wanted him to reach.

In the middle of the most dangerous night of her adult life, a man was consulting her about her own rescue.

She had spent a decade being handled — moved from room to room, decided about, spoken over by physicians who addressed her father as though she were furniture in the corner.

To be asked, now, when it mattered most, what she wanted done with her own life, undid something in her that all the cruelty never had.

She answered his questions in a steadier voice than she expected.

And somewhere under the fear, a thought she did not yet have words for was forming: that this, and not the wedding, was the moment she had actually married him.