Here was the shock: beside her in the rumpled bed lay the man—the man with the gnarled-looking white hair, the stranger intended to be her husband, on his back, open-mouthed, asleep, breathing deeply, as a drowning man might suck at air.

Stunning to Abigail to realize that she’d slept beside her captor. Hours of oblivion, shame.

In her sleep she had not known. Yet she must have known. Could not have not known.

Again it came to her: how large, how solid, how purposeful, how real, a (masculine) body beside a (female) body, horizontal in a bed.

In the night the man must have pulled off the red plaid shirt—his fatty chest was exposed in a thin, stained undershirt. Beneath the satin comforter his lower body might have been naked. (She could not bear to look. Would not.) On the carpet beside the bed lay the man’s red plaid shirt, trousers that looked as if they had been flung down.

The white hair was disheveled. The face showed strain, fatigue. Coarse hairs had begun to sprout on the jaws. The eyelids quivered. A whistling sound in the nose. Oh, she’d been hearing that whistling in her sleep, it had insinuated itself into her sleep, in her dreams, a bright red thread of mercury, a poison seeping into her brain. Abigail shrank from the man, in revulsion for his damp, perspiring body and in dread of waking him. A despairing thought came to her like a reversed prayer—Will I have to kill him to be free?

An unnatural light shone through windows overlooking a flattened landscape, a bright-blue papier-mâché sky. Piercing laser-white of spring sunshine, from which there is no escape.

And the sweet-poisonous smell of gardenias—this too clung to bedsheets, pillow, her hair, which was matted and wild about her head, as if she’d been a captive not for less than twenty-four hours but for many days.

On her (bare, tender) feet!—carefully easing out of the bed. Scarcely daring to breathe for fear that the imposter-husband would awaken suddenly.

She must escape her captor.

She must act quickly, immediately.

She must not allow her captor to take the advantage again. To wake, to overcome her.

Rapidly her thoughts careened along a roadway to an unavoidable destination: she would break the vase over the man’s head as he slept, cracking his skull and rendering him helpless; the blow might not kill him, for Abigail had no experience committing so desperate an act, no sense of how much strength might be required to execute it; nor did she want to hurt another person, even an adversary. Even a poorly cast actor meant to be her husband.

And if she rendered her captor unconscious and helpless, where would she find the key? In a pocket of his trousers? In a drawer somewhere in the room? She had no idea.