Megan’s mother quietly closed the door, twisting the handle so the spring mechanism didn’t pop when the door caught. The same way a nursery door would quietly be closed.

Alone again, Megan reactively scrolled through her empty phone until she finally threw it onto the comforter next to her and lay down on her bed. She had badly miscalculated, figuring that after more than a year no one would still care about her story. Now the book she didn’t write but which carried her name and image was a best seller. She had originally agreed to the book on her mother’s urging. It would pay for college, her mother told her. And would help other girls of abduction. Megan’s father was indifferent about the idea, struggling in his own way with the circumstances of their new lives. But once the idea of helping other victims came about, everyone else jumped on board. From Claudia the agent to Diane the editor to Dale the publicist, and eventually to the sales force at the publishing house. No one could admit that Megan’s story offered an opportunity for profit. The same way Dante Campbell could not perform her interview without first establishing that Megan was healing, none of them could stick a dollar in their pocket from the sale of the book without first referencing all the “girls” it was helping and all the semesters it was financing.

The book was born only because Megan needed something to give her parents that reminded them of their daughter. She needed something to work on that showed them the old Megan still existed. The Megan they loved and clung to. The smart Megan, ambitious and talented. The all-American girl filled with determination and bursting with potential. She had nothing else to offer her parents after the abduction, so Megan agreed to write the book with Dr. Jerome Mattingly, a noted psychiatrist who’d written a hundred other books, and on whose couch Megan lay twice a month. Whatever. It kept her busy, and kept her parents mostly out of her hair. Her mother so desperately longed for the girl Megan used to be that the desire practically oozed from her eyes whenever she saw Megan editing Dr. Mattingly’s work.

There was no combination of words to explain the phenomenon Megan had undergone. She had yet to find a way to tell her parents that the daughter they remembered from before that summer was gone. Cynthia and Terry McDonald would need to come to this conclusion on their own. Until then, Megan played along. She allowed her mother to hope somewhere in the chapters of a morose autobiography that the child who once existed would be found, and that the old Megan would spill back to her from the pages. Megan owed her mother the courtesy of the illusion that the great Dr. Mattingly would tease the old Megan from the prickly vines of the new world she had returned to after her escape. Brush off the burrs and the dirt and the pain and the memories to deliver Cynthia McDonald’s daughter back to the world as though the last fourteen months had never happened. As if those two weeks in that cellar were nothing but a distant, transparent memory easily looked past.

The problem was that Megan didn’t want the help. The only girl she wanted to save was long gone. Megan was sure no book, bestseller list, or fantasy about other girls being inspired by her story would be enough to erase the image she held of herself running to safety while Nicole Cutty sat alone in that dreary cellar waiting for the man to come at night. Waiting for the keys to rattle and the floorboards to squeak. So many noises announced his presence. The soft hum of the car’s engine. The thump of the door slamming. The keys jangling and the door scraping across the floor when he opened it. His steps—the gentle drumming of soft-soled shoes against the dusty, wooden stairs as he descended to the cellar.

All these sounds came at night. It was his favorite time.

*

“Tell me about it,” Dr. Mattingly said. “Tell me about that sound.”

Megan sat in a plush chair in Dr. Mattingly’s office. This was her twenty-eighth session, two each month since her escape, and she was finally starting to buy into the idea of hypnosis. Before she met Dr. Mattingly, the only time she’d seen someone “hypnotized” was during a school variety show where the hypnotist pulled student volunteers from the crowd and made them hop around stage like frogs. Hypnosis, Megan was learning, was a real thing. It was a state of consciousness that allowed thoughts to surface which might otherwise stay buried.

It was immediately after one of Dr. Mattingly’s hypnosis sessions that Megan had remembered so clearly the sound of airplanes that flew overhead during her captivity. And there was something else along with those airplanes, some other noise that had settled into the deep alcoves of her mind. A noise she was trying to retrieve. So delicate and draining was the process—like stretching under the bed for an object just out of reach, she drummed her fingers to gain that extra fraction of an inch. And now, on Dr. Mattingly’s fat chair, Megan knew not to strain too hard. After twenty-eight sessions, she knew the process. To find success, she had to give herself to Dr. Mattingly’s voice. Go only where he suggested. When she resisted, when she pulled her thoughts to where she believed they should go, the effect of hypnosis was lost and her mind drifted and she woke to find Dr. Mattingly snapping his fingers and repeating the word no no no no. Over the past year Megan had learned that getting into the correct mindset took time and patience, and once in that state, resistance could ruin the effect in seconds. She had only one shot during each visit and she found herself letting go of her rebellious attitude for two hours each month when she saw Dr. Mattingly. She was making progress, even if it was for a different purpose than Dr. Mattingly understood. His goal was to explore every inch of her mind to remove any repressed thoughts about her captivity. Shine light on all of it and it will eventually stop hiding.

Megan had a different goal entirely.

“It’s the airplanes overhead,” Dr. Mattingly continued. “Tell me again about the sounds.”

Megan didn’t want to talk about the airplanes again. This breakthrough had come last time. There was something else she wanted to reach for, something new, and she felt the proverbial fingertips of her mind stretch and strain for that other thing. The other sound she wanted so badly to identify. Something in her posture or her eyelids or her breathing betrayed her thoughts.

“Stay with me,” Dr. Mattingly said in his calming voice. “Stay with what we can identify for certain. Just for now. We’ll go to that other sound soon. Concentrate on the airplanes for now. Tell me about that sound.”

“They were high, but not spec-in-the-sky high. Medium high. They gave a low rumble like a far-off highway,” Megan said, still with her eyes closed.

“And tell me the direction again.”

Megan almost allowed the thought that she’d already been through this to pass through her mind. She resisted the temptation.

“It came from the back wall,” Megan said. “Far away at first, then louder as it moved overhead. Then . . .” Long pause. “It faded.”

“How did it fade?”

“From the windows. I could only hear the plane through the boarded-up windows in the back of the cellar. Once the plane was overhead, it faded away.”

“Go to the other side of the room,” Dr. Mattingly said. “Tell me what you see there. Tell me about that room. The cellar.”

Megan had spent so much time in the cellar during these sessions—all her time, actually—that it was no longer disturbing to be there. At first, she blocked those images from the spotlight. Ran from them. But through her visits with Dr. Mattingly, she eventually understood that running from something implanted in your memory was like trying to pass a mirror without seeing your reflection.

It was not easy at first, but once she understood the possibilities of hypnosis, Megan gave herself fully to the process. So now, despite wanting to explore that other thought, the other sound that had just poked her subconscious, she instead put her trust in Dr. Mattingly to take her there in due time.

“Concrete floor,” she said. “Gray floor. Cold at night, which felt good on my feet because it was so hot during the day.”

“And the walls?”

“Same. Bare concrete with grooves or ridges every so often. A bed in the back corner by the windows. No sheets, just a box spring, frame, and bare mattress.”

“Now walk to the other side. Away from the windows. Follow the sound of the airplane. What is there?”

“It’s a square cellar. My bed is there. Three windows boarded over. I can only walk for a short distance. I’m shackled to the wall by a strap on my ankle. I can go only as far as the chain will allow. There are stairs here, on the other side of the cellar.”

“Can you see the stairs? Can you reach them?”