We didn’t have dinner that night. Lance went out looking for our daughter. Leah and I stayed home and waited for Leslie to walk in the door. I let Leah heat a microwave dinner for herself. She made one for me as well, but I couldn’t eat. I don’t remember eating anything again until after I collapsed at a press conference two days later.

The following Monday afternoon a mail carrier had spotted Leslie’s bicycle discarded over an embankment on a country road.

The nightmare had begun.

Lauren saved her work and pushed back from the desk, feeling drained and wondering at the wisdom of tackling this project. She had thought it would be somehow healing to put all of the emotion down on paper, that she would somehow be able to let some of it go. But the reliving of it all . . .

She wondered what Anne Leone would have to say about it. Most therapists she had ever known or heard of from friends wanted their patients to spill their guts, lay it all out, dissect and examine and reexamine, regurgitate, and on and on.

She wondered if Anne had done that in the aftermath of her narrow escape from death at the hands of a madman. She wondered if getting it all out and hashing it all up had lessened the terror she felt in remembering that night when she had had to bash a man’s head in with a tire iron in order to save her own life.

She wondered how Anne managed to seem so normal after all of that. Lauren hadn’t felt normal one day, one hour, one minute since her daughter had been taken. She hadn’t been able to pretend otherwise. She had watched most of her so-called friends move farther and farther away from her as she had failed to crawl out of the emotional snake pit, as she failed in their eyes to even make an attempt.

They seemed to think losing a child was something one recovered from, got over. Lauren couldn’t see that happening. It struck her as obscene to think it, let alone do it.

It wasn’t normal to have a child violently snatched away. It wasn’t normal to have to live through the searches, the public pleas, the press conferences, the spotlight of suspicion that had been turned back on them. It wasn’t normal to watch the man who had taken your daughter and done who knew what terrible things to her walking around free to live his life.

And if none of what she was living through was normal, how was she supposed to be normal? Why would anyone expect her to be normal? Why would she try to pretend to be normal? To make the normal people with normal lives feel less guilty that they weren’t her?