‘That was two days of lights-out,’ Shannon said. ‘No one’s even looking for you yet. Are you gonna do what I want?’

She nodded vigorously.

He sighed. ‘I’m not convinced,’ he said, and turned the lights back off.

•

The next blackout lasted only three hours. Or he said it did. Later Abbey would start to suspect he was lying to her. Her hunger gave her a sense of time passing, and it didn’t seem to line up with what he said. Sometimes it felt like days between his visits, but he said it had been only hours. When he eventually told her she had been missing for two weeks, she was sure it had been more like nine days. He always smiled when he told her what day it was. Like he enjoyed having control over time itself.

Shannon had thought of everything. There were no sharp objects in her cell. Nothing electrical. Nothing heavy enough to break the glass or use as a weapon, except the bed frame, and she had no tools with which to disassemble it. There was no plumbing to sabotage. She was expected to piss and shit in an old paint bucket, which she kept sealed in one corner. Another bucket had clean water, with a washcloth. The bedclothes were polyester, which she thought about setting fire to—but she couldn’t work out how to create enough friction, or what she would do once she was trapped in a burning room. Several times per hour she would reach for her phone to Google something like this, and then remember that Shannon had taken it.

She started to wonder if he’d done this before. And, if so, what had happened to the last woman who lived in this little room.

If she’d been a ‘good girl’, she would be fed. A TV dinner would be passed through the slot cut in the bottom of the door, with bottled water. No cutlery. This slot—barely wide enough to put her hand through—was also used to deliver outfits and sex toys. The sex toys came in increasingly disturbing shapes and sizes. She was told where to put them, and to act like she enjoyed it. If her performance wasn’t good enough, lights out.

Sometimes he left the lights on for what felt like weeks, and that was almost as bad. The colours were slowly bleached out of her prison. It was like jet lag, making her feel physically ill. Without real sunlight, she started to become delirious, convinced the fluorescent bulbs were irradiating her, giving her skin cancer. Sometimes it felt like she couldn’t breathe. She would press her lips to the holes in the plexiglass and gasp, her heart bursting.