The Never List

for herself and using it instead to promote an agenda—exactly as the modern world demanded. She had no time or pity for those who could not find a purpose in it all, as she had done.
    If I wanted to explain, it was now or never. Maybe I wouldn’t even have time. Maybe Noah and Jack’s men were outside right now. But if there was one thing I wanted Tracy to understand, it was this.
    I walked over to Jack’s desk. I’d seen him sitting behind it so many times before, when I was there on the rack, exhausted from pain, and he would scribble away in his notebooks. In its perverse way, that desk was a symbol of peace for me. I knew when he started writing, I would at last have a few moments of respite, and there would be no more torture that day.
    I pulled out the oversize oak swivel chair and sat down. I felt like a child sitting in the grown-up seat. It engulfed me, but in a strange way, I thought being there might give me the power to speak.
    I looked over at Tracy, who would still not look at me; at Adele, who was watching me carefully, giving no hint of what lay behind her gaze; at Christine, who had stopped sobbing and was nestled in the window seat, her eyes staring vacantly ahead of her. She’d found a tissue somewhere and was wiping her eyes.
    Finally, I picked up a pen on the desk, a Waterman, and started to push and pull the cap on and off in a steady rhythm. I waited, hoping that eventually Tracy would crack. She would look at me. She had to.
    And then she did. She turned slowly to face me, peering out at me from under her dyed-black bangs. Only then did I start, in a halting voice, to explain what had happened that day. My throat was dry, but I pushed myself on.
    Those last months in the cellar, I had worked hard to get Jack to believe I was coming around to his way of thinking. I was manipulating him, just as I knew he was manipulating me. I knew one day he would test me, though I didn’t know how. He had been treating me differently now for weeks, no regular torture, just the large looming threat of it always in the air. He pretended to cherish me. Almost … almost to love me.
    I knew if he believed I was under his spell, he might give me a longer leash. Might ask me to do chores for him outside, might even take me out of the house.
    Finally, that day, he opened the door. The same door that kept us imprisoned in the house now.
    He opened it. I was standing there before an open door. Granted, I was naked and sore and hadn’t eaten in days, so I was weak, but there, there, there, in front of me … was an open door.
    I looked ahead. Jack was right behind me, his breath on my neck. I saw the barn, the yard in front, his car. I walked slowly, steadily out the door, hoping I could get more than an arm’s length away from him where he couldn’t easily yank me back. I was in a daze.
    He had told me I could see her, and he kept his promise. There on the ground, just at the edge of the barn door, wrapped haphazardly in a dirty blue tarp, was a long lifeless form. At the bottom I could just see a bloated chunk of flesh, blue and black. A human foot.
    I had been begging, begging for months to see her body. I neededto say good-bye, and I thought that was the one thing he would do for me. And there she was. When I saw her there, when I saw that flesh peeking out from under the tarp, the body he had dug up for me to see, I suddenly didn’t want to see her anymore. I realized, at once, what the reality of her dead body would mean to me. The finality. I had seen enough.
    At the same time, I couldn’t think clearly about whether I needed to put in more time convincing him of my loyalty. If I hadn’t been so hungry, if I hadn’t been in pain, if I hadn’t feared the body I saw in front of the barn, maybe my own body would not have reacted as automatically to the sudden taste of freedom and the exhilarating feeling of fresh air on my skin. Something lit on fire at that moment, the innermost part of me that only wanted escape. My legs found their strength, and my heart found some current to lift it up. With a sudden start, I broke into a run. He must have thought I would be too terrified to do anything so bold so quickly, because there was a split-second pause before he followed me.
    I knew if he caught me, all my hard work for the previous four months would be lost. He would never trust me again. I would never have another chance. This was it.
    I ran as hard as I could, gasping for air almost immediately. My