Every time.

For three days, starved and cold and afraid, she refused to write a single word, because she understood that the letter was the whole point, that the letter was the thing that would make her disappearance her own fault in the eyes of the world.

And on the third night, alone in the dark, she found a sharp, rusted iron bracket bolted to the cellar wall, and she sat there for hours rubbing the rope that bound her hands against its edge, back and forth, back and forth, until the fibers finally frayed and snapped.

And then she ran — through pitch-black woods, in one shoe, until her body gave out beneath a pine tree, where she lay down certain she was going to die alone, believing that when they finally found her, the whole town would simply nod and say she had run away.