“Can I ask you where you got the idea for this?” Bowman asks. Her tone has shifted ever so slightly. We’re no longer casually conversing. She’s friendly but moving toward some specific point. “I’m sure writers get asked that all the time, and you probably got into it last night at the library. But it’s such a fascinating book, I wanted to ask.”

I have an answer. Even though I didn’t write the book, I prepared one because I’d heard from writer friends what I would be asked. They said that at every book signing and in every interview, someone would inevitably ask where the idea came from.

“I’ve always been fascinated by murder cases,” I say. “And I’ve read about a lot of them. But also . . .” I clear my throat. Madeline was right—I do talk about Emily’s and Jake’s deaths a lot as a way to sell books. But it never feels natural to me. “Because of my own experiences with loss, I’m interested in the way people respond when terrible things happen in their lives. When something unexpected happens, and everything gets turned upside down, how do people find a way to keep going and move on?”

“Right, right. I can see that. Your character in here, Lilly, the younger woman in the story, she had the loss of her father when she was young. And then her friend Sarah gets murdered. A lot of loss.” She taps her fingers against the book cover. Long, slender fingers I remembered from when Madeline disappeared. Fingers that would play the piano. Tap tap tap. “Do you ever use details from real murder cases in your writing?”

“Not directly. No.”

Tap tap tap.

“I’m asking because . . . Well, do you remember Sophia Greenfield?”

“Sophia Greenfield? Is she a writer?”

Bowman smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. She shifts her weight on the couch, scooting forward. She holds the book in her right hand and points at it with her left. “Sophia Greenfield lived here in Gatewood, over off of Oak Tree Parkway. A woman in her late twenties. She was murdered in the parking lot of her office about two and a half years ago. She worked for a local nonprofit that promotes literacy, and she’d been at the office late, planning a fund-raiser. She told her husband she had a meeting, but nothing was listed on her calendar or her computer. No one seems to know who the meeting was with. Her husband told us she’d been pretty agitated and distracted in the days leading up to her death, like something was on her mind. But she never said what. This doesn’t sound familiar?”