Robyn's bracelet chimed: LUNCH!

She had just finished another tedious session on the treadmill, watching a film about an Australian track star who volunteers to fight in World War I, where he is eventually machine-gunned to death by Turks. Clearly, whoever was in charge of selecting these movies was out of his mind.

Robyn was doing crunches on the crimson Zapotec rug when she heard the scrape-and-click of a deadbolt releasing. Robyn's stomach gurgled uneasily in Pavlovian response.

"Who's hungry?" Dave asked, almost pleasantly, as he came through the door.

During the last few weeks, there had been a noticeable shift in Dave's attitude towards Robyn, who had impressed him with her renewed spirit and receding waistline. He still spoke to her with maddeningly dry sarcasm, but there was a glint of playfulness in his eyes that hadn't been there before.

He waved the glass under his nose like a sommelier. "Mmm. I detect notes of asparagus, acai berry and, if I'm not mistaken, a soupçon of furniture polish."

Robyn smiled despite herself as she sat up on the carpet, her back against the bed. Dave walked slowly towards her, careful not to spill the revolting beverage. He placed it next to her. She picked it up and brought it to her lips, but when the odor hit her nostrils, she recoiled and put it back down.

"Ugh! You weren't kidding."

She expected him to leave, but instead he said, "Mind if I join you?" and plopped down next to her on the floor without waiting for an answer. Robyn raised her eyebrows in surprise. This is new.

"So," he said nonchalantly, "how's it going?"

"You know," she said guardedly. "Same old same old. Just living the dream."

Dave let out his leaky, spirant version of a laugh. "You have such a great sense of humor," he said with uncharacteristically sincere admiration. Robyn's eyes darted back and forth in confusion.

"Would you like a power bar?" he said genially, reaching into his pocket. "They're not bad." He held out the bar for her inspection. It was oatmeal raisin, a flavor about which Robyn had no strong feelings, one way or the other.

"Unauthorized calories, Dave?" she tisked. "What's going on?"

"Nothing," Dave said, and gave her an actual smile. Robyn realized that she had never, until this moment, seen his teeth. They were dazzling.

"I just thought, you're working so hard and you're looking so great. I think you deserve some sort of reward." He gazed into her eyes with a seductive stare. "Don't you?"

And then he leaned in to kiss her.

Robyn froze, paralyzed by a swirl of overlapping and conflicting thoughts. They went from disbelief ("Holy crap! Is he trying to kiss me?") to belief ("Holy crap! He is trying to kiss me!") to resentment ("He didn't show any interest in me until I became one of the beautiful people!") to triumph ("Oh, my God! I'm one of the beautiful people!") to guilt ("I can't cheat on Brian!") to lust ("But Dave is sooooo hot!") to anger ("He's fucking holding me captive!").

As Dave's face inched closer to hers, she felt herself wavering. Up until this moment, she had never in her life had a prayer of attracting a guy this gorgeous, at least not while he was sober. Now here was Dave - practically sculpted from Italian marble - wanting her. She knew it was wrong, but she also knew that, in not too long she would become a faithful, loving wife, and a chance like this would never come again. Ever.

Decisions.

But then Dave accidentally knocked over the glass of repulsive, clotted liquid that was supposed to be her lunch. It spread across the rug like an oil slick.

"Shit!" Dave shouted. Robyn instinctively leapt to her feet and ran to the bathroom to retrieve a towel. Whatever moment the two of them had shared was irrevocably shattered.

She yanked the fluffy terry cloth towel, emblazoned with the Tenacity logo, off of the towel rack and ran back to Dave. "Thanks," he said as she handed it to him. He began to frantically dab at the spill.

Robyn stood over Dave, who was on his knees, his attention completely focused on trying to salvage this mess. For an unconscionably long time, it did not occur to Robyn - who was reliving the past traumas of her own stained carpets - that this was her opportunity to put Part One of the escape plan into effect.

All at once, she remembered what she should be doing. "Jesus!" she exclaimed, disgusted with herself. "I almost forgot."

"Forgot what?" Dave asked absently as he blotted the carpet with the graying towel.

She kicked him in the face. He let out a cry of pain.

Robyn thought about how close she had come to surrendering to his advances. Embarrassed by her weakness, she kicked him again, even harder this time.

Robyn burst through the door and quickly slammed it shut. A surge of adrenaline was making her hand shake, but she managed to turn the deadbolt. It clicked into place, just as Dave threw his weight against the steel reinforced door.

She heard Dave's muffled howl of pain.

"Sorry!" Robyn felt compelled to say and then she turned to survey her surroundings. The grounds were empty, almost eerily so. It was a windless day and nothing moved. It was as if the entire world was holding its breath.

Her muscles tensed, preparing to launch her on a mad dash to the wall, and then over. But then, to her utter shock, Debbie stepped out from behind an oak tree.

"Stop!" Debbie commanded, her voice deeper and more resonant than seemed physically possible, given her compact frame.

"Get out of my way," Robyn said, barely able to hear herself over the pounding of her own heart.

"I'm sorry, Robyn," Debbie said, pulling out her cattle prod. "I can't do that."

"I don't want to hurt you," Robyn warned. "Well, actually, I really do want to hurt you, so..." She trailed off, lacking the presence of mind to end that sentence with a convincing threat.

Debbie took a step forward, pressing a button on the stainless steel tube. She held the tube high in the air, jagged electricity crackling menacingly. She expected Robyn to cower in fear, as she had so many times in the past, but Robyn's adrenaline-charged body was in fight-or-flight mode and she came down firmly on the side of fight.

So Robyn stepped forward and, for the first time in her adult life, threw a punch.

By any standards, it was a pretty terrible punch. A big, sloppy, slowly arcing roundhouse. But to Robyn's utter amazement it connected squarely with Debbie's cheek and she collapsed like a perky sack of wheat.

Robyn never dreamed that Debbie could be defeated this easily. She had assumed, incorrectly and again with a touch of racism, that Debbie was proficient at the martial arts.

She made a quick mental note to stop thinking so racistly.

Then she made another quick mental note to see if "racistly" was even a word.

Then she went over the wall.

When Robyn first arrived, the wall had seemed so forbidding, but now she was scaling it with almost simian dexterity. Her body felt agile and light and she soon found herself perched on top of it, looking down at the other side.

To her surprise, she found that the compound in which she had been imprisoned was located in the middle of an industrial park. She wasn't sure what she had expected, but it certainly wasn't something this banal. From here, she could see the offices of FedEx, Columbia Cardboard Box and Time Warner Cable customer service, if such a thing could be said to exist.

"Freeze right there!" a voice shouted at her melodramatically, in an indeterminate Eastern European accent.

She looked over at the guard tower to see a corpulent man in a rent-a-cop uniform leveling a rifle at her. His pudgy finger was whitening on the trigger, his left eye squeezed shut and his right sighting her through the crosshairs of a high-powered scope.

This should have terrified Robyn, but not even for a second did she believe that he would pull the trigger, assuming the gun was even loaded, which she was confident it was not.

The people going about their daily business in the parking lot might be blasé about this walled compound with guard towers, but if her bullet-riddled corpse plummeted to the asphalt, there were bound to be questions from the police and negative reviews on Yelp.

She smiled at the rent-a-cop and held up her middle finger. He glared at her, but didn't pull the trigger. His bluff called, he impotently lowered his gun.

Robyn lowered herself as far as she could and then let go of the wall, dropping to the ground. She alighted in a flower bed of lavender-blue catmint, the soft, loose soil cushioning her landing. Too late, it occurred to her that she should have landed in a classic three-point superhero stance. Because that would have been badass.

She heard a frenzied beeping noise and realized it was coming from her activity tracker. GO BACK! it flashed, over and over. She tore it off her wrist and smashed it into silence against the brick wall.

She turned and looked back up at the guard tower, where the rent-a-cop had shouldered his rifle and was making a frantic call on his cell phone. His jowls wobbled as he shouted, gesticulating wildly in her direction.

Robyn grinned, savoring her victory over the forces of evil and, also, the irony of a militant weight loss center being guarded by a fat man. But she knew better than to savor it for long. They would surely be after her. So she executed the third and final part of her escape plan.

She ran away from the wall.

Robyn sprinted over the hot asphalt through a maze of nondescript corporate buildings. A woodworking company, a jujitsu studio, a fiberglass insulation manufacturer, all of them blurred past her as she desperately tried to find the exit.

And then she stopped dead in her tracks.

She stared straight ahead, her mouth agape in reverential awe, like she was watching the gleaming city of Atlantis rise out of the ocean.

"No. Fucking. Way."

Standing before her, in red brick and black awnings, was a Coldstone Creamery.

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