We had looked at each other. We’d hardly spoken. But on that fateful day, the backpack would stay by the side of the highway while the girl came with me. I snatched her right out of her beautiful little life and pulled her, kicking and screaming, into my depraved fantasy. In a single act, I ruined everything that she ever hoped she could be. If all my plans had come to fruition, thirteen would have been her last birthday. But she survived the fiend that I was. Somehow, she crawled back out of the woods where I left her, a fractured remnant of who she’d been when she stood before me at the bus stop.

At least, that’s what everyone says happened.

Only half of that story is true. I did stand before the child at the bus stop that day, impossibly taller and broader and stronger than her, opening the back door of my car, watching her nervous eyes. But in reality, I’d only pulled over to shift my fishing rod off the backseat where it sat leaning against a window, tapping irritatingly on the glass as I drove. I’d spoken to Claire Bingley briefly, but what I’d said wasn’t an invitation to come with me, a plea or a threat. I’d made some stupid comment about the weather. Cars full of witnesses had whizzed past us on the road, looking out, photographing us with their suspicious minds, knowing somehow that we weren’t father and daughter, that something was wrong here. Premonition. I’d got back in my car and driven away from Claire, forgetting her instantly, having no idea what was about to happen to her. Or me.

Someone did abduct that little girl, just seconds after I’d been there. Whoever he was, he did take her into the woods and violate her, and he did make that awful decision, the worst a person can make—he decided to kill her. But she survived, too traumatized to know who the hell had done this to her, too broken to put anything much about the crime into words. It didn’t matter what Claire said anyway, in the end. The public knew who’d done this. Twelve people had seen the child, seen me standing not far from her, talking to her, the back door of my car yawning open.

I’d heard the story of Claire’s attack described to me so many times across my trial and incarceration that it was easy to see myself doing it. There are only so many times you can hear a lie before you start living and breathing it, actually remembering it like it was real.

But it was not real.