The forest was dark and the rain torrent. With tape binding her wrists, she tried to deflect the branches that whipped her face. She stumbled on a log and fell into the slippery leaves before forcing herself up again. She had counted the days and thought she’d been missing for twelve. Maybe thirteen. Stuck in a dark cellar where her captor stowed her and fed her, she may have missed a day when fatigue sent her into a long stretch of sleep. Tonight, he moved her to the forest. Dread had overwhelmed her as she bounced in the trunk, and a nauseous feeling told her the end was near. But now freedom was in front of her; somewhere beyond this forest and the rain and this night, she might find her way home.

She ran blindly, taking erratic turns that stole from her all sense of direction. Finally, she heard the roar of a semi truck as its wheels splashed through the wet pavement. Breathing heavily, she sprinted toward the noise and up an embankment that led to the two-lane highway. In the distance, the truck’s red taillights sped on, fading with each second.

She stumbled into the middle of the road and on wobbly legs chased the lights as though she might catch them. The rain pelted her face and matted her hair and drenched her ratty clothing. Barefoot, she continued in a push-slap, push-slap gait brought on by the deep gash on her right foot—suffered during her frantic march through the forest—which trickled a crooked line of blood behind her that the storm worked to erase. Driven by panic that he would come from the forest, she willed herself on with the sensation that he was near, ready to fast-step behind her and pull the sack over her head and bring her back to the cellar with no windows.

Dehydrated and hallucinating, she thought her eyes were deceiving her when she saw it. A tiny white light far off in the distance. She staggered toward it until the light splintered in two and grew in size. She stayed in the middle of the road and waved her bound hands over her head.

The car slowed as it approached, flashed its high beams to illuminate her standing in the road in wet clothes and no shoes, with scratches covering her face and blood dripping down her neck to dye her T-shirt red.

The car stopped, wipers throwing water to each side. The driver’s door opened. “Are you okay?” the man yelled over the roar of the storm.

“I need help,” she said.

They were the first words she’d spoken in days, her voice raspy and dry. The rain, she finally noticed, tasted wonderful.

The man walked closer, recognized her. “Good God. The whole state’s been looking for you.” He took her under his arm and led her to the car, carefully seating her in the front passenger seat.

“Go!” she said. “He’s coming, I know it.”

The man raced around to the other side, shifting the car into drive before his door was closed. He dialed 911 as he sped along Highway 57.

“Where’s your friend?” he asked.

The girl looked at him. “Who?”

“Nicole Cutty. The other girl who was taken.”

The Book Tour

Twelve Months Later

New York

September 2017

8:32 a.m.

Megan McDonald sat spine-straight in the chair and watched Dante Campbell read through interview notes without a hitch while a stylist dabbed her nose with a powdered brush, and general chaos occurred around her as producers shouted orders and lighting changes and the time remaining in commercial break. The shoulder shrugs and the deep breaths had done nothing useful, and had actually caused a knot to form in her trapezius, which was starting to spasm. Megan startled, a quick flinch, when a different makeup artist touched her cheek with a brush.

“Sorry, sweetheart. You’re too shiny. Close.”

Megan closed her eyes while the woman ran a brush over her face. A voice off in the darkness, beyond the television cameras, began counting down. Her mouth went cotton-dry and a noticeable tremor took control of her hands. The makeup people melted away and suddenly it was just Megan sitting in the bright lights across from Dante Campbell.

“Five, four, three, two . . . you’re live,”

Megan stuffed her shaking hands under her thighs. Dante Campbell stared into the camera and spoke in the practiced pitch and varied cadence perfected by morning-show hosts, among which her show was the top rated.

“We all know the harrowing story of Megan McDonald. The all-American girl, daughter of Emerson Bay’s sheriff, who was abducted in the summer of 2016. One year later, Megan is out now with her book, Missing, the true-story account of her abduction and courageous escape.” Dante Campbell pulled her gaze from the camera and smiled at her guest. “Megan, welcome to the show.”

Megan took a hard swallow of dry nothingness that nearly made her choke. “Thank you,” she said.

“The country and, of course, Emerson Bay has wanted to hear your story for more than a year. What inspired you to finally share it?”

Since booking this interview, Megan struggled with the answers she would give. She couldn’t tell the great Dante Campbell the truth—that writing the book was the simplest way to tame her mother’s sorrow and buy some breathing room. It was a way to get her mother, neurotic with worry and angst, off her back for a few months.

“It was just time,” Megan said, deciding finally on the answers that would best get her out of the bright lights. “I needed to process everything before I was ready to tell people about it. I’ve had a chance to do that, and now I’m ready to tell my story.”

“Time to process and to heal, I’m sure,” Dante Campbell added.

Of course, Megan thought. Because, after all, it had been a whole year, and certainly such a time frame was sufficient to heal. Surely, a full year would make her complete again. Because, if Megan didn’t come across as healed and happy and recovered, Dante Campbell—queen of morning television—would look wicked while drilling her for details. Please, Megan thought, tell your audience again how mended and restored I am.

“That too, yes,” Megan said.

“I’m sure something like this takes a long time to get over, and in some ways documenting the events in your book was therapeutic.”

Megan stopped herself from rolling her eyes. She had many adjectives to describe the process that created her book. Therapeutic was not one of them.

“It was.” Megan smiled with her lips pressed together. It was her new smile, the best she could do and so different from the beaming pictures she saw the other day when she paged through her senior yearbook. Back then, her smile was wide, with straight, bright teeth filling the space between her curved lips. She tried at first, but it was too hard to fake that big smile so she came up with this new one. Lips together, edges turned up. Happy. People were buying it.

“What can people expect from reading your book?”

Megan wasn’t completely sure, since she hadn’t written much of it—that distinction went to her shrink, who snagged a byline on the cover.

“It, uh, you know, covers the night it happened.”

“The night you were abducted,” Dante clarified.

“Yes. And the two weeks I spent in captivity. A lot of it is stuff in my head that I thought about while being held. About where I was kept, and all my failed attempts to get away. And then about the night I, you know, ran out of the forest.”

“The night you escaped.”

Megan hesitated. “Yes. The book documents my escape.” The thin smile again. “And a whole chapter about Mr. Steinman.”

Dante Campbell also smiled. Her voice was soft. “The man who found you on Highway Fifty-Seven.”

“Yes. He’s my hero. My dad’s hero, too.”

“I bet. We had Mr. Steinman on the show, not long after your ordeal.”

“I saw, and I was happy that he got the recognition he deserves. He saved my life that night.”

“Indeed.” Dante looked down at her notes before smiling again. “It’s no secret the country has fallen in love with you. So many people want to know how you’re doing and what’s next for you. Will they get any of that from the book? About your plans for the future?”

Megan pulled her hand from under her thigh and rotated it in the air to help her think. “There’s a lot about what’s happened since that night, yes.”

“With you and your family?”

“Yes.”

“And with the ongoing investigation?”

“As much as we know about it, yes.”

“How difficult is it for you to know your abductor is still out there?”

“It’s hard, but I know the police are doing everything they can to find him.” Megan made a mental note to thank her dad for that answer. He fed it to her the night before.

“Before this all happened, you were on your way to Duke University. We’re all curious to know if that is still an option for you.”

Megan rubbed her tongue around the inside of her sandpaper lips. “Um, I took a year off after this happened. I was trying for this fall but that didn’t work out. I just . . . couldn’t get things organized in time.”