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“No, you may not.” I smooth the blanket once more before walking past him.

Oliver follows me into the hall. “She told you to decide.”

“I did.” I head toward the playroom.

Oliver steps into the doorway before I can pass. “Our phones are in that closet.” His voice remains level even as one hand closes around the book. “We can call the police while she’s gone. They could be here before she returns.”

“Simon is with her.” I glance toward the front door.

“We tell them that.” Oliver shifts the book beneath his arm. “We give them her name, the description of the car and everything we know about where she might have taken him.”

“We don’t know where she took him.” I step closer. “If they’re five minutes late, she comes back without him.”

Oliver looks down at my throat. “You have no reason to believe she would kill him before attempting to get away.”

“You watched her choose his burial clothes because he broke a bracelet. You want to gamble, use your own throat. She already put the baton against his.”

“You wanted him gone,” Oliver says. “Before you understood she might discard the rest of us too.”

I look through the playroom doorway. “Then he found the purple bead.”

Oliver’s eyes return to mine. “He gave it to you. I saw that too.”

“You could’ve told her.”

If Oliver tells her, Simon gets the white jacket again, and Heather might decide I need something pretty too.

“I could have.” He adjusts the crooked corner of the paperback beneath his arm. “That doesn’t make this house safe.”

“It means you didn’t want her to clear the table.” I step around him and enter the playroom.

Oliver follows. “Keeping Simon alive isn’t the same as choosing to remain kidnapped.”

I sit beside the dollhouse and look at my empty blue bedroom.

“You don’t want to be rescued,” Oliver says.

I turn the tiny blue lamp off, then change my mind and switch it on again. “I don’t need to be.” I leave the light burning inside the empty room.

“That was not what I said.” Oliver sets his book beside the miniature table and sits across from me. His knees nearly touch mine in the narrow space.

“No,” I say. “I don’t want to leave her.”

Oliver studies me. “She drugged you, abducted you and buried six men who slept in your room before you.”

“I know.” I pick up the little blue pillow and press it with my thumb. “She still chose me.”

“She chose the man before you too.”

“He wasn’t good enough.” I smooth the tiny cover where my doll usually lies.

Oliver removes his glasses and wipes them on the hem of his shirt.

“I think you want her to keep making you stay.” I wait until his glasses are back on before smiling at him. “Then you never have to admit you did it yourself.”

His hands stop with one arm of the glasses still caught above his ear. He fixes them carefully before answering. “You’re mistaking my unwillingness to let her murder either of you for attachment to her.”

“You waited fifty-seven minutes before you asked for the key.” I reach into the little green bedroom and straighten the wire glasses on his doll. Oliver watches my finger leave them. “You followed her rule and asked me instead of taking it. You knew Simon gave me the bead, and you kept your mouth shut.”