Jack Laurence

Accepting reality doesn't mean you agree with it or condone it or even stop wanting it to change.

It means you stop wasting energy fighting what already is and redirect that energy towards surviving it.

Nigel wouldn't be giving up.

He would do something far more difficult.

He would accept that he could not control when this ended and who ended it or whether it would end at all.

And in doing so, he stopped spending what little psychological energy he had left on a battle he couldn't win and started spending it on the only battle that mattered.

Getting through today and then tomorrow and then the day after that.

However, before he even made it to that point, those days would become far tougher after the pair's failed escape attempt.

Chapter 10.

If you run again, we'll kill you.

The pair are both shackled with no hopes of ever running again.

Later that night, they're bundled back into a car and driven to yet another location.

And the following morning, Nigel wakes up to a sound that he knew meant the rest of their time in captivity was about to get even harder.

The failed escape had changed everything.

Up until this point, as brutal as the captivity had been, there had been a kind of transactional logic to it.

Nigel and Amanda were worth money.

Alive, cooperative, kept in a manageable condition.

They had value.

That calculation had provided a flaw, a grim but sort of real limit on what their captors would do.

The escape attempt blew that flaw away.