By the time his parents realized they were prisoners, they had already, step by tiny step, handed over every key to the cell.

That is why it had taken an outsider, a son arriving without warning, to see it.

From inside the slow accumulation, the water had never seemed to boil.

It had only, gradually, grown warmer, one small degree at a time, until two people who had run their own lives for fifty years were asking permission to open their own refrigerator, and could no longer quite remember how it had come to that.

Chapter 13 — The Box