It was a locked door she owned and a person in the next room who believed her.

For someone who has had neither, it is close to everything.

Dalton had hired her a year and a half earlier, not long after her mother died, when she was newly alone in a country that was not yet home.

He had been generous at first — praised her work, raised her hours, spoke to her with a warmth that a grieving young woman had no reason to distrust.

Then the warmth became something with a price.

He increased her hours until the job swallowed her days and left no room for anyone else; he made himself the center of her small isolated world and then behaved as though that were natural.