IT HAD taken Adrian Pollard years to realize her life consisted of one long chain of mistakes, one leading to another then another like a falling line of dominoes.

Looking back, she saw that her fear of parenting the children she’d carried had stemmed from a self-absorption buried so deep within her she didn’t even know it existed.

She’d always considered herself a kind woman—she didn’t gossip or pick fights, she didn’t lie or steal—but the other, darker Adrian hidden beneath the surface had total reign over all.

This realization came one day when Adrian had the news on at the house she shared with her now-estranged husband, Yuri Polusmiak (never would she use that surname again). The anchor reported on a story about a woman who allowed herself to be murdered by a violent burglar so her young child would have time to escape and call for help. The woman’s brokenhearted husband, who hadn’t been home during the burglary, praised her self-sacrifice because their daughter had survived the ordeal without a scratch.

The story rendered Adrian more than speechless. Never before in all her years had the idea of a mother losing her life for her child crossed her mind. She’d thought the anchor would go into additional details about the woman and her child but he moved on to lesser stories about a celebrity’s million-dollar wedding and an unfortunate hike in energy prices.

Adrian left the room unnerved and located the story on the Internet. The woman’s name had been Krista Boone. She was a stay at home mother who often volunteered at the school where her daughter, Lila, attended kindergarten. The entire community where the woman lived had gone into mourning. A few kind souls started a fund for the Boone family to cover funeral expenses because while they had been a happy family, they had not been rich.

Adrian took one look at the four-carat diamond mounted in white gold on her left ring finger, then at the designer bathrobe draped over her thin frame, feeling somewhat lower than the dirt she and the cleaning staff never allowed to cross the threshold of the house.

She grew increasingly withdrawn over the next several days as she pondered the disparity between her own life and that of the late Krista Boone. Yuri, her husband of five years, demanded to know what her problem was since she could barely bring herself to crawl out of bed and cook for him, but she had not yet formulated her thoughts and feelings into words that could easily be conveyed.

He’d taken her silence for insolence and punched her so hard he blackened her eye. Sobbing, on her knees, Adrian had blubbered out the story she saw on the news and how she felt she’d made a grave error by not bothering to raise any of her children.

Yuri, who despised all children and had even paid for Adrian to have a tubal ligation the week after they were wed, laughed at her and asked if she was stupid.

Stupid was an understatement that did not fully describe the irresponsibility of her actions. She’d given birth to four children—two boys and two girls—and left them all when they were less than a month old, partly from fear. Or was it mostly fear? Parenting would have required her life to change, and change had always frightened her.

Would she have chosen to die for her children? Never.

Days passed, and Adrian’s despondency showed no signs of lifting. Yuri mocked her, telling her she needed to get over herself and forget about her children since she’d never had anything to do with them in the first place.

His words and increasing hostility deepened her awareness of her extensive failures. During the years they’d been together, he’d often knocked her around if she didn’t do things precisely how he requested. She’d taken it all without complaint. After all, he was her husband and provider. He paid for her nice clothes and her favorite wines and beer and gave her everything she ever asked for. Sometimes she didn’t show enough gratitude, so she more than deserved the punishments he periodically bestowed upon her.

Except for this. Regretting her past decisions didn’t disrespect Yuri in any way she could see.

Over dinner one evening she casually brought up the topic of her children again. “Yuri,” she said, mindlessly twirling her fork through the pasta on her plate, “I really do think it’s appropriate that I call on each of them so they know I’m sorry for treating them like I did.”

That sent Yuri over the edge. “You know what’ll happen if you go knocking on their doors at this point?” he’d screamed as a vein throbbed in his temple. “They’ll find out I’ve got money, and they’ll want to bleed me dry like a bunch of little leeches. Is that what you want to do to me? Make me go broke over a few little whelps whose only connection to me is that they came out of that hole between your legs?”

Adrian bowed her head to avoid meeting his gaze. “You’re right. I was wrong to think I should see them. I’m sorry, Yuri. I’m so, so sorry.”

He seemed to accept her apology for the time being, but he kept his gaze fixed on her for the rest of their meal like some wild beast monitoring its prey.

That night Adrian slipped two sleeping pills into one of his drinks. Once he was out like a hibernating bear, she gathered up as much cash she could find around the house, packed a travel bag, and left on foot.

She paused once to glance back at her home, knowing she wouldn’t see it again. Tonight the three floors and sprawling north and south wings looked more like a cold fortress than a place where a family might live.

Strangely, leaving Yuri was harder than leaving any of her children or their fathers. With Yuri she’d lived with riches and comfort, and she was reluctant to let those things go. Did that make her a bad person? Of course it did.

She walked for an hour before calling a cab that took her to a used car lot, then waited by the entrance until it opened in the morning. She bought a disintegrating Ford Escort for $300, picked up some clothes at the thrift store next door, and got out of town before Yuri could find her.

It took Adrian several weeks to track down her three youngest children, and her reunions with each of them were anything but heartwarming. There had been tears. Screaming. Cold indifference, which somehow was worse than anything else.

Not that she’d expected much different.

When she learned that her oldest child had moved to the west coast, she’d almost thrown in the towel, but her conscience wouldn’t let it go. The fact that he was her firstborn seemed to make it even more important that she speak with him, if only for a minute or two—however long it took for her to say what needed to be said.

So she set out on what would prove to be the longest road trip of her life. About midway through Iowa the Escort’s exhaust started making an unpleasant rattling noise that made her think the whole bottom was going to fall out of it. Then a couple states after that the brakes began grinding whenever she applied them. If she didn’t know any better, she’d have said the Escort was trying to self-destruct like one of those spaceships in the movies.

All of this went through her head as she stood waiting on a sidewalk in the darkness, arms hugged against her chest. Squares of pale light shined from the fronts of silent houses, and further down, a yellow porch light cast its glow over a narrow front yard.

Things are going to be better now, she thought as she continued to wait for the people who might give her a job. So much better.

The front door of the house with the porch light flew open and one, then two figures bounded out. Adrian squinted to see better but a sudden flash of headlights blinded her and then—

THE FIRST things Adrian became aware of when she awoke were blinding pain in her head and overwhelming nausea in her gut. I’ve been in an accident, she thought, though she could remember no such event. Perhaps she’d hit her head so hard that she was experiencing temporary amnesia.

Something cold and damp touched her head, and her eyes flew open. A fiftyish brown-skinned woman standing beside her held a wet cloth that dripped onto Adrian’s shirt.

Adrian scrambled to sit up. Instead of a hospital, she found herself in a windowless room with concrete walls lit by three bulbs in pull-chain fixtures on the ceiling.

She tried to think, but it only deepened her pain. How had she arrived in this place? The last thing she could remember clearly was driving past the green and white Welcome to Oregon sign beside Interstate 84. Other things must have happened between then and now—the dull shadows of them flitted back and forth in her mind, and like dust motes, the more she tried to grasp them the further they drifted away.

Two other women sat on cots nearby, quietly weeping. One was Asian—Chinese, maybe?—and the other was white like Adrian.

“Where am I?” Adrian asked in a cold voice.

The brown-skinned woman pursed her lips and said something in Spanish, but it had been so long since Adrian studied it in school that she couldn’t understand.

“Doesn’t anyone here speak English?” She glanced over at the white woman, who had blonde hair and looked young enough to be Adrian’s daughter. “Hey. You on the cot. Can you hear me?”

She gave no acknowledgment that Adrian had made a sound.

The woman with the dripping cloth backed away, her posture and expression oozing smugness. She wore nice clothes in contrast to the other women, whose outfits were torn and stained with grime.

A bucket topped with a toilet seat occupied the back corner of the room. A half-used roll of paper sat on the floor beside it.

The walls closed in around her. Adrian rose on trembling legs and seized the Spanish-speaking woman by the shoulders. “Where are we? Why can’t you tell me where I am?”

The woman pulled away and slapped Adrian hard across the cheek.

Their two companions glanced up but said nothing.

Tears stinging Adrian’s eyes, she said, “I know you can understand me. I demand to know what’s going on.”

The woman slid a phone out of her pocket, dialed a number, and spoke rapidly into it for ten seconds. Then she moved toward a smooth metal door that didn’t have a knob and waited.

A minute later the door swung open and a beefy man holding a gun stepped into the room, raked his eyes over its occupants, and then let the woman out into the hallway that lay beyond it.

He gave a nod and followed her out. The door swung shut so hard that Adrian felt the floor vibrate.

The blonde woman lifted her head. “It sure sucks to be you right now, doesn’t it?”

Adrian’s heart skipped a beat. “You can understand me.”

“Yeah, but she can’t.” She gestured at the Asian woman, who gazed longingly at the closed door. “They don’t like it if you talk too much. Your best bet is to stay calm and just accept whatever happens because freaking out isn’t going to fix anything.”

“But where are we? Why are we here?”

“Haven’t you guessed?” The woman gave her a sardonic smile. “We’re for sale.”