The summer of 1992 wasn't arbitrary. It was the last summer before everything — before cellular phones erased distance, before mass incarceration became a national conversation, before the particular silence that follows a betrayal could be interrupted by a text message.
The summer of 1992 wasn't arbitrary. It was the last summer before everything — before cellular phones erased distance, before mass incarceration became a national conversation, before the particular silence that follows a betrayal could be interrupted by a text message.
When Malik and Lena meet at that old mill outside Cedar Hollow, they are living in a world that punishes slowness. Letters take days. Apologies have to be delivered in person or not at all. Love moves at the speed of trust, which is to say, it moves slowly.
I needed that slowness for this story. I needed the reader to feel the weight of years passing — the way a decade of silence can calcify into something you carry like a stone in your chest. If this story happened today, Malik might have texted from prison. Lena might have followed him on Instagram, watched his release date approach in real time. The grief would be different. The longing would be different.
It had to be 1992 because 1992 is the last year you could truly disappear from someone's life. It's the last year that love — real, patient, aching love — had no choice but to wait.
I grew up in Alabama. I know those summers. The heat that comes off red clay roads, the sound of gospel through a window screen on a Sunday morning, the particular quality of light in late August when everything feels both still and on the verge of something. I wrote this book to go back there — and to understand, finally, what we owe each other when we've been the cause of someone else's disappearance.
Writing 1992 was a way of being honest about what I was really writing: a story about what happens when time runs out, and love still hasn't.