Chapter 1 — The Threat in the Kitchen

“If you or your mother ever try to leave me,” Gavin said, “I will make certain that neither of you ever opens your mouth to say anything again.”

He said it looking me straight in the eyes, with a small, satisfied smile on his face, the way a man smiles when he believes he has just fastened a chain around someone’s neck and heard it click shut.

We were standing in his kitchen, the good silverware still on the dining table in the next room, my mother somewhere upstairs fetching a sweater, and he had chosen that private moment to show me, at last, exactly what he was.

I did not answer him.

I did not argue, did not raise my voice, did not tell him what I thought of a man who would say such a thing to his wife’s daughter in his own home.

I simply looked down at the floor, at the toes of his expensive shoes, and I let a small silence sit between us.

He watched me do it, and something in his shoulders eased, and the smile widened, because he thought he understood what he was seeing.

He thought he had frightened me into submission, the way he had frightened my mother a hundred times before.

He thought the quiet, soft-spoken daughter had just learned her place.

That was the first of the many mistakes Gavin Prescott made about me, and it was not the last, and it was very far from the worst.

But it was the one that started everything, and so it is the one I will begin with.

I have thought a great deal, since, about that small satisfied smile of his, because it contained the whole of him.

Gavin Prescott believed, all the way down to the bottom of himself, that the world was divided into people who frighten and people who are frightened, and that the only question in any room was which one you were going to be.

He had spent his life, I think, being the first kind, and he had gotten very good at reading the second kind on sight, at knowing within a minute or two whether a person could be pushed.

What he never understood, what men like him almost never understand, is that there is a third kind of person, one who has learned to look exactly like the second in order to study the first.

He looked at me lowering my eyes in his kitchen and he saw prey.

He had no idea he was looking into a mirror that was memorizing his face.