“Is he ever going to come meet me?
I sat on the freezing stone floor, drawing meaningless patterns in the dirt with my trembling fingers, desperately trying to distract my mind from the agonizing hollow in my stomach. I had been trapped in this cold cell for over a month now or maybe longer. I don’t really know. Time had lost all meaning in the dark.
But the worst part wasn't the passage of days; it was the psychological torment of how our tiny scraps of comfort were systematically stripped away. First, they took the mattress, leaving us to sleep on the jagged cold stone. Then the thick blankets vanished. Finally, the meals stopped coming entirely. Toby and I were starving, our bodies eating themselves from the inside out. Lately, even the thin, stale bread and watery soup given to the o
