Behind The Billionaire's Locked Room

“Billionaire John West keeps two women in his tower. One of them is me. The other one had a funeral five years ago. My sister has two weeks to start a treatment that costs three hundred thousand dollars. For years, John has been buying my work through strangers. He's been collecting me. Now he wants the rest of me; one year alone in his penthouse, making art only for him. He'll pay for Caitlin's treatment. "That's not a business arrangement," I tell him. "That's a cage." "Yes," he says. "It is." I sign. At the end of my hallway is a door with no handle. Behind it, a ventilator breathes twelve times a minute. I gave him my rule-he doesn't touch me unless I touch him first. But then, he breaks it with a kiss. Then, half asleep in bed, he calls me by his wife's name. Past that door, I find her, and three hundred and twelve recordings of my brain, measured against hers. She was the preserved data, and I was the active study. I escape down a dumbwaiter shaft in my socks. He pleads guilty to every count. When he gets out, we start again on his terms: once a week, and nobody decides what the other one can't handle knowing. Then I break them. I find the woman his mother paid to disappear, and hide it from him for eleven weeks. When my sister relapses, I buy her a cure she said no to. He kept me in the dark to save the woman he loved. Now I'm the one keeping him there.”