I noticed, that night, the specific way she kept checking the locked door — not once, but every few minutes, a small reflexive glance, the habit of someone who had spent a long time in a place where a locked door did not necessarily mean safety.

It is a thing I have seen in a great many of the people I work with, and it never stops affecting me: the small physical tells of a person who has been taught, over months or years, to live in a state of quiet readiness for the next bad thing.

Her body did not yet know it was safe.

It would take longer than a night, longer than the case, for it to learn.

But she was under a roof that was not his, in a room with a lock she controlled, and my investigator was on the phone in the hall arranging somewhere she could stay that Dalton would never be able to find.

It was not much, on that first night.