A few months after Raymond’s visit, Deana’s family headed to Poland and underwent screenings for tuberculosis and HIV. After three days, they were given a visa and put on a thirteen-hour flight to Chicago, and then another flight to Dallas.

On the plane, Deana tried to imagine what life might be like in Texas. The only thing Deana knew about America was that it was home to New York, a city crammed with tall buildings and fancy people. Maybe it will be like that, she thought.

She couldn’t have been more wrong. The place they moved to was a blink-and-you-miss-it hamlet—one so small, in fact, that I’m not naming it for privacy reasons. She arrived to find that the three-bedroom house Raymond had told them about was still unfinished. Raymond’s kids from his previous marriage weren’t able to communicate with Deana and her brother, and they kept a chilly distance. Deana’s family were issued cards informing them they were “aliens.”

While working on this book, I planned a summer trip home during which I was going to meet Deana and several other sources in person. While I was there, I also did reporting for a story on the town where I went to high school, McKinney. The story involved a lot of door-knocking, and almost every person I approached slammed the door in my face or didn’t believe me when I said I had lived there.

It was during one such long day, when I was stewing about how much my hometown rejected me, how they distrusted me, how I didn’t actually know anyone, that I ripped a hole on the inner corner of my right thumbnail. I’ve picked at my fingers my whole life, but this time it looked deep enough to see meat. I washed my thumb off with hand soap, then proceeded to, smartly, cook raw meats, use dirty yoga mats, and shake hands with dozens of people I met doing interviews. Midway through the trip to see Deana, my thumb wound started to look brown and cloudy, and the skin around it turned white and puffed up. Pain coursed across my hand and up my wrist. I was beginning to face my first-ever major consequence of skin picking.