FBI agents were led to the body by suspect Richard Allen Davis, age thirty-nine, a man who had an extensive criminal record, including two previous kidnappings, who had violated his parole numerous times, and who had evaded law enforcement officers twice in the weeks following Polly’s abduction, the first encounter being only an hour after he took her, when two patrol officers helped him get his battered Ford Pinto out of a muddy ditch, even though he was notably inebriated and disoriented, with dirt on his clothes and twigs in his hair. She may very well have still been alive, and nearby.

I confess I didn’t sleep well in the weeks and months I researched Polly’s case and others. The profound suffering of the victims and their families crept into my dreams—and onto the page. It began to feel imperative that I tell their stories as bluntly and factually as possible, as a way to honor their lives and dignify their deaths and disappearances. Saying their names became for me a sacred act. A kind of prayer.

Just a month after his daughter’s kidnapping, Marc Klaas started the Polly Klaas Foundation, a grassroots nonprofit organization that has since worked with thousands of families, law enforcement officers, and volunteer workers to help find missing children. The foundation, as part of Polly’s legacy, has also helped alter the California legal system, which now mandates life imprisonment for repeat violent offenders, and put Amber Alert laws in place across all fifty states.

Polly’s parents have both repeatedly spoken of the way their community’s search for their daughter showed the very best of humanity, a steady light in the midst of unbearable darkness. I realized I wanted to write about that. About how a town can come together when the worst happens. About how if we’re ever going to truly heal, we need one another to get there.

Writing a novel is such an interesting mix of effort and surrender, of control and vulnerability. It wasn’t until late in the stages of drafting that it fully dawned on me just why I was so drawn to tell this particular story and not any other. My troubled detective, Anna Hart, is obsessed with trauma and healing, with intimate violence and the complex hidden connection between victims and predators, because I’m obsessed with those things, and long have been. I’ve given her other parts of me too—a version of my childhood spent in foster care, and my abiding love of the natural world as deep medicine. What Anna knows and thinks about the hidden scars of sexual abuse, I know as a sexual abuse survivor.