No. I shook the images from my mind. I didn’t want to revisit that scene ever again. Visualize, I remembered, and so I visualized myself where I’d rather be—here, at work. I went back inside and closed the door.

“Jingjing?” I said to my office ceiling. “Get me Yves in Tours.”

Epilogue

Digital voice recording automatically made by the Ma Belle virtual assistant program, February 2, 2014, at 9:02 p.m., via mobile app registered to Lucy Carter-Jones, and automatically saved to a remote server on a cloud farm in Virginia:

I know what you did.

[long silence]

What—? What just happened? What did you do?

I didn’t do anything. The power went out.

Oh, God. Push the alarm.

I already did. Hello? Security guard? Can you hear me?

Nobody’s answering. Why isn’t anyone answering?

Looks like we’re stuck. Locked in a cage. Now you know how that feels.

Don’t.

Eighteen hundred people. Sold. Locked up. Shipped off like cargo. You did that.

Please. Don’t.

How can you sleep at night? How can you get up in the morning? How can you live with yourself after what you did?

Stop. Please.

[Sounds of weeping]

I can’t.

Can’t what?

Live with myself. I can’t. After those girls—those men on those boats—

You put them there. You.

It’s like a curse. My family curse. Generation after generation. It has to end. I—I came here tonight to kill myself.

Oh, sure. Then why are you still breathing?

I—I couldn’t do it. I have a family. I have children.

They had families, too. All those people you sold.

They can’t know about this. My children. They have to be free from this curse. Which means they can never know. No one can ever know.

What? Oh my God—what is that? Put that away! What are you doing?

I can’t have you walk out of here knowing what you know. I can’t have you telling anyone about it.

No, Lucy, you don’t want to do this. No!

[Sounds of grunts and gasps, followed by a blast and a thud]

[Silence]

[Sound of three electronic beeps]

911. What’s your emergency?

Acknowledgments

Myriad thanks to Jennifer Weltz, who does everything an agent is supposed to, brilliantly, but who also sparks some of my best ideas and saves me from most of my worst. I’m always grateful, even when I grouse. Thanks also to Ariana Philips, Maddie Ticknor, and all the other great talent at Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency.

It’s a pleasure and a privilege to work with Sara Nelson, my editor, who first read this novel while holed up in her house during a hurricane and still managed to put together the deal that brought me to Harper. I’m so grateful to Sara and all the rest of her team, including especially Mary Gaule.

Many thanks to Heather Drucker for all her efforts on behalf of this book. When I first learned that Heather would be the publicist for The Cage, multiple people told me she was the best in the business, and now I know that they were right.