I arrange my wrists deliberately and position my right arm alongside my left so that I can accurately measure the swelling. It’s going down, at least. The gash from the metal cuff still gapes a little but the bruising around it has faded to green. It started as a bright violet, then a deep blue.

I think that means I’ve lain here for days. I try to track how often the light dwindles outside the window or how many meals she delivers on the tray. I think it’s eleven meals so far, with dinner still to come tonight.

I never know how Nora will act, what kind of mood will steer her, but I’ve discovered certain patterns and clues. Like how she opens the door—if she kicks it open, without knocking, she’s already angry about something. That means I need to talk fast and agree quickly to whatever she’s decided we should accomplish that day. Nora has some sort of schedule, but it’s posted in her mind, and it shifts with her moods.

If Nora knocks softly and peeks her head in before fully stepping into the room, then she treats me kindly. She offers a lot in those moments—a phone call later on to my mom, a hot shower. Those promises never materialize, and I’ve learned the hard way not to ask after them. But, in those moments, Nora intends gentleness.

I’ve learned by listening. Nora has a sister, I think. Older. Her name is Helen. She seems to live far away and I don’t think she knows where we are. I don’t think anyone knows where we are. There are no neighbors dropping by, no parents checking up on us like this is the world’s worst slumber party.

Sometimes I fall asleep because I’m tired. I feel like I’m performing all the time, acting like the needy friend Nora seems to want to fuss over. I cry a lot; I beg to go home. I try very hard not to make her angry. I navigate those moments like a tiny sailboat, trying not to sink in the crashing waves of Nora’s emotions.

Sometimes I fall asleep to escape. I let myself drift away. I have stared at the knotty pine of this bedroom for hours. I still feel sore; my head hurts in some way pretty much all the time. My wrist kills me and the raw skin under the sharp bracelet of the metal cuff feels like is it rotting away. I pretend I’m back home, shut in my own room, with a lock on my door and my mom right down the hall.

Sometimes I only pretend to sleep. When I hear Nora puttering around the cabin, I try my best to fit in stretches. I strain to exercise. I stay ready to fight. I won’t let my body just atrophy in this bed. When the kitchen faucet turns on, I start leg lifts. When the broom swooshes across the floor outside my room, I do crunches.

When she knocks softly on the door, and calls out, “Shea?,” I take deep breaths. Inhale, exhale. It can’t look like I’ve been exercising. She sets a mug down on the desk near the door.

“Oh, hi, Nora.” I contort my mouth into a fake yawn. “Do you need help cleaning up?” I keep my voice sleepy so that it doesn’t sound like I’m angling to be released. Just trying to be a helpful guest as I lounge, handcuffed to the bed.

“That’s so sweet, but no, thank you. I have all of it covered. How are you feeling?”

Terrified. Doomed. But I nod vigorously. “Hmmmnnn-hmmmm.” I don’t want to commit to feeling a certain way until I understand what comes next.

“I brought you some medicine.” She gestures over to the mug on the desk.

“Oh, I’m okay. My wrist feels loads better. But that salve has helped a whole lot.”

Nora clucks her tongue, the way our school nurse does when she thinks we’re faking cramps to get out of a bio test. “I can put some more on. That’s great news that it’s healing. I knew it would. You just needed to really rest it. Squirming around wasn’t helping anything, you know.”

I keep my whole body still. My stomach lurches. I hate that I’ve basically invited her to touch my arm. She retrieves the tube of ointment from the windowsill. “It’s funny how the geranium extract works better than the Neosporin, right? All those harsh chemicals and it’s the power of plants that heals us. I packed an herbology book with me. You won’t believe what we’ll have available to us, if we keep a careful eye during hikes.”

I keep my gaze fastened on Nora’s face. I refuse to glance over at the handcuffs. The salve stings and I bite my lip to stop a whimper from seeping out. My voice is only the slightest bit shaky when I ask, “You’d want us to hike together?”

She says, “Soon enough,” in a flat, empty voice that makes me think I’ll never step foot out of the cabin again.

I press a little harder. “I would love some fresh air, Nora.” I see her shoulders tense—I’ve pushed too far. She drops my hand and the cuff clanks against the bedframe.

“Fine.” Nora bites out the word. “Let me open a window for you.” She moves past me with enough force that I feel myself flinch. But she doesn’t touch me again. It only feels like she might punch me. Nora moves the mug from the desk to the bedside table, without looking in my direction. “You should drink that.” Her voice sounds gruff, and the door slams closed when she exits.

On the first day of my captivity, I might have cried when she left the room. Now I shake it off. It’s a routine with a few missteps. Nothing disastrous. I just have to keep trying.

And then I hear a new sound. I hear a second door slam. I hear the footfalls scatter gravel and then the muffled slam of a car door closing. The engine turns over and fires up. I hear the gravel scatter and know Nora’s backing the truck down the drive.

A panic tightens around my heart. Nora hasn’t left the cabin all week. I can’t even imagine where she’d go. She was angry, but I’ve seen her angrier before. “She’s going to come back.” When I hear my voice say it, I recognize it as true. It makes no sense to put all the work into creating the perfect hostage hideout and then leave me handcuffed to a bed just because I asked to go hiking. “It’s another mind game.” I try the words aloud. “She’s testing me.”

And then in case of some sort of elaborate ruse, I shout loudly toward the kitchen. “Nora! I’m really sorry. Thank you for opening the window.”

I listen hard and force myself to breathe. I half expect to hear the truck careen up the drive, the cab door slam. I wait for her to kick open the door and pelt me with grilled cheese sandwiches.

But all I hear is the hum and gurgle of appliances. I hear birds and the rustle of the wind through the trees outside my open window. For the first time in days, I am fully alone.

I stand up and lunge toward the door out of instinct—only to fall to my knees almost immediately. The handcuff yanks the split skin of my wrist. It hurts so much I swallow down vomit. I remind myself to breathe. I regroup.

I try to examine the handcuffs without jostling them. It’s like that game Operation, when you have to reach into the board and perform surgery without making a wrong move and triggering a loud buzzer. I move so slightly, tenderly. I hold the cuffs with my good and free hand and pull at them, testing to see if there’s any give in the iron railings of the bed.

The bed is built solidly. It’s not going to bend; no piece will twist off and free me. I bend my hand into the smallest claw possible and try to ease it through the metal ring but that still doesn’t work—even with the freedom to move every which way and try out every angle.

I’m bleeding again. A trickle of blood runs down my arm. Moving around so much must have broken a scab. Nora will see my blood smeared around and know right away that I’ve tried to free myself. I breathe myself back to calm. I problem-solve, bending my face to my arm and licking it clean.

I force myself to let go of the notion that I can dismantle an iron bed. Unless I want to just sit and wait, wasting any chance to explore my surroundings, I need to reframe my goals. It takes a few minutes to maneuver, but I figure out that I can push the iron bed a little at a time with my one good arm. I shove an inch or two and then creep forward. Shove a little more and follow with my feet. I work carefully to avoid another moment of handcuff agony, but I finally reach the window.

The screen seems old; its silver mesh looks dull in spots, as if maybe it’s been repaired. I give myself a few moments just breathing in the mountain air. I take care not to push my face against the screen hard, but I want to. The bedroom walls seem to close in. My whole self rages for the space that stretches outside. I inhale and then exhale. I calm myself.

I crane my head and try to get a sense of the landscape. I see a firepit out back, a swing built from an old ski lift. Otherwise, I see pines. Tall lines of pines, one behind the other. Dense—not like someone planted them as a border between neighboring properties, but thick and randomly spaced in the way that forests grow on their own. The cabin came last, I understand. Someone, maybe Nora’s dad or his parents, cleared the land enough to build the cabin and carve a driveway from the woods to the road.

I don’t see any other roofs through the trees. I don’t smell smoke coming from other chimneys. There’s no one to hear me scream for help. I try anyway. But there’s no one to rescue me from Nora.

I remind myself to keep breathing. It’s not exactly new information. The clear view out the window just confirms our isolation. “No news here, Shea.” I say it aloud to myself. “Keep gathering information,” I chide.

It feels good to hear my own voice—my real voice. Not the act I put on for Nora with the apology built into every inflection. My cultivated lack of threat to keep her calm and a little less crazy. I inhale and exhale and remind myself that every minute Nora’s gone counts as an opportunity. “Find something useful,” I order myself.

Deep down, I understand she would never just leave my phone on some random shelf in the cabin. But I have to check. It’s the only chance worth taking.

I get to work on the slow task of moving the bed in the other direction. I inch away from the window, keeping an eye on all the dust bunnies tumbling across the wood planks for the floor. The iron posts of the bedframe leave faint tracks in the dust. If I stretch my foot, I can smear them with my toe. At least Nora won’t be able to trace every movement when she returns and checks in on me.

I memorize the exact mark on the floor where the bed rested and then keep pushing toward the door. This direction feels more dangerous. Before, I felt ready to thank Nora profusely for opening the window, to explain that I’d felt the fresh air would help me feel my best. Not a perfect line, but at least some kind of explanation. At least I could lean on a plan.

Nora would not consider a field trip to the living room acceptable behavior. I know that. I know it so well I need to refocus on my breathing because my knees shake as I creep forward. My head swims with fear.

Each time I lurch ahead and drag the bed along with me, it scrapes against the wood floor in the loudest way imaginable. I hear the scrape and stop, then try to listen past the pounding in my heart. And then finally, I reach the bedroom door.

It takes almost stretching myself into a split to manage swinging open the door with one hand, while my other wrist stays linked to the bed. I end up counting down twice before I can gather the courage to turn the knob and shove the door open. And even as the door swings outward, I prepare myself to see Nora perched on a rocking chair, staring at me, waiting for me to step out of line.

The cabin is empty. I find the kitchen in the corner to my right. I see the front door, but it’s not the kind with a window; there’s no way to see past it to the front of the house. It looks like Nora has been shoving around furniture herself. A sofa, armchair, and coffee table lean against the wall closest to the kitchen. Someone’s painted one long wall of the cabin with four different colors. A curtain of twinkle lights rounds out the collection of backgrounds.

It’s exactly how I’d prep the space for videos. At least, if I wanted consistency. Filming outside in front of a stretch of pines would turn a whole new page. But I don’t expect Nora to know that. I get the sense she’s new at all this.

In the corner, by the front door, I see my shoes. They look like I just stepped right out of them. Without thinking, I step closer; pain signals sweep through my arm. My throat aches too. I feel like weeping, seeing my sneakers there and remembering the last time I kneeled down to tie them tightly. It feels like years have passed since the night of the fair.

My eyes scan the room: shelves, countertops, bookcases. I don’t spot my phone anywhere.

She hasn’t left much of anything out in the open. I contort my body every which way, trying to locate any advantage. No neighbors, no phone, no weapons. None of the risks I’ve taken have resulted in anything more than my continued helplessness.

And now I need to put myself back to bed. Just the idea of it threatens to defeat me. I take one last look outside my bedroom door and try to memorize every detail. I promise myself I’ll review every mental snapshot of the cabin’s layout during the long hours spent sitting around like a houseplant in Nora’s care.

I pull at the cuff around my wrist purposefully. The pain snaps me back from moping and I get to work. Slowly I inch the bed back to the exact place it had been. I make sure to line up the bed’s sharp angles with the marks left on the bedroom floor. I remind myself that details don’t escape me. I’m trained to be exact in my actions.

I look back to my sneakers in the corner and note they had happened to land in third position. Then I remember tiny Shea Davison, who lived in a leotard and snapped to attention every time a dance teacher counted out a beat. This girl Nora, with her swaying moods and her brooding quiet, does scare me.

But I have steadied myself at a barre, while a grown woman paced behind me, slapping a wooden stick against her hand. I’ve stared at myself in the mirror while Madame Flint announced to the whole room that my talent was questionable and really, I’d been given access to the advanced class due to my unyielding mother. I’ve leapt into the air while Madame Flint shrieked at me to make my thick thighs work against gravity. I’ve steeled myself to stand with perfect posture while a volatile woman prodded any soft spot on my body, hissing that I’d need to step up my training, that she could see the exact spot my lunch had landed on my hips.

I know how to respond to pressure with precision. I breathe deeply and recheck every tiny element of my surroundings. I expect to hear the truck come barreling up the drive at any moment, but until I hear those wheels, my body won’t allow itself to be folded back into the bed. I move the rest of me as much as possible, even as I keep my left arm carefully still. My muscles relish flexing. I relax a little and let myself enjoy the exercise.

I don’t notice my socks until I hear the rumble of the truck approach. I hear the gravel give under the wheels just as I realize that I’ve been using my stockinged feet to smear any tracks through the dust on the floor. The white cotton that covers the bottoms of my feet is now stained sooty gray.

Of course, Nora will check the bottoms of my feet to make sure I’ve stayed in bed. She’s crazy but she’s not stupid. She’s managed to set up the cabin just so and orchestrate an elaborate kidnapping. Chances are, Nora would describe herself as detail-oriented too.

The truck’s engine chokes off as I desperately tear the dusty socks off my feet. I submerge them in the full mug on my bedside table just as Nora slams the car door shut. Then I hurl the mug onto the floor. It shatters spectacularly. I wipe drips of the liquid off the bedside table with the socks and then drop them onto the small puddle on the floor below me.

I hear footsteps on the porch out front and then the jangle of keys turning in the lock. I inhale and count to four as I exhale. I settle myself back in the bed and pat the cover down around me. I close my eyes and wait for Nora’s scrutiny.