“Bad things happen everywhere to little girls,” my father said when we were splitting logs in the backyard one Sunday afternoon not long before it happened. The impetus for the conversation was a story that had been blared all over the news. A ten-year-old from Chehalis had been snatched in front of her house. The news media was all over the story, of course. Reporting every nothing new as if it were something. In the end, the news was as many expected. Her mangled body was found in a tangle of blackberry vines that had overtaken a vacant lot one street over. She’d been savagely attacked, though at the time I didn’t see the brutality behind a physical beating. I didn’t know what grown men might do to a little girl. My father did. “Even here in Shelton,” he told me, dropping the ax into the buff grain of an alder log. “High alert for strangers, Lee. At all times? Got it?”

I said that I did.

But that day I didn’t. That day the incident happened. When I peered inside, I could see right away that there were no kittens in his car. Al’s hand went over my mouth and nose.

Lights out.

Duct tape, it turns out, is useful for many things beyond household repair. When I woke up, my wrists and legs had been bound. My lips had been sealed shut. I remember running my tongue over my front teeth, feeling the sticky residue of the adhesive. It’s a nothing moment, I know. But it’s one of those things that lift the curtain every now and then. I hate going to the dentist, because after a cleaning by the hygienist, my tongue wanders over the slickness of my teeth. Even when I tell myself not to, I do it. I feel the smoothness and think of the glue from the duct tape. Every single time.

I knew he did something to me “down there,” as I would later call it. I was sore and bloody. I think that I cried, but I really don’t remember. I know that my brain called out for my parents and my brother. I knew for a fact, as I lay there naked and terrified, that if they didn’t find me, I’d die like that girl from Chehalis.

I wish I’d known her name back then. I wish that I had paid more attention to her story. I should never have looked in that car. I wonder if she’d done the same thing. If he’d wrapped her in duct tape before he did what he did.

I eat a few bites of my dinner, but my stomach is in knots, and I don’t even know why I tried to eat something. A minute later, I’m lying on my bed there with my cat, fully clothed, bedside light on.

The light is always on.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

ADAM

I drive the half mile to Octopus Hole and push to the front of the crowd of onlookers. It’s what I know will be the worst Sunday after the worst Saturday of my life. My heart strikes like steel against steel. I’m there for a reason. The others are there to watch a show. It’s been twenty-four hours since Sophie went missing, and what her father insisted had happened has. She’s gone. I can see by the way the police hold back the people gathered there that just beyond the dock at Octopus Hole is the floating body of a woman. She’s facedown, nude. I don’t need to see her face to know it’s her. I can tell by her hair, her legs, and her delicate wrists. I can even see the small hummingbird tattoo that she’d had done when she was seventeen—something she always insisted that her parents hadn’t known.