You wake up in a box. It's the same box you've lived inside for years now. A narrow space,

not much bigger than your body, set into a platform under a bed. It's just big enough for you,

a sleeping bag, and a bedpan. It's both better and worse than your situation was before in the last

place you lived. That box was even smaller. but there was a workshop where you stayed at night

doing little tasks like shelling walnuts or making macramay and that had a chair. You never thought

you'd miss that tiny space, but you do. You're not always in the box. Sometimes you're brought out

and you're chained up in the bathroom. Sometimes you get to work outside in the garden or do chores around the house. And sometimes, too often, far, far too

often, horrible, terrible things happen to you while you're outside of the box but chained up.

But you try not to focus on those. You try not to focus on the man who picked you up off the street.

One spring day in May of 1977, a man you thought seemed nice because he had a wife, an infant daughter with him in the car, a man with a pleasant smile and a kind face who seemed like a normal family man, caring enough to give a lone hitchhiker a ride.

His name was Cameron Hooker, and he proved to be anything but normal, or kind, or nice, or caring. You're a true master at compartmentalization by now,

so you focus on the peaceful times when you're caring for two young girls or cleaning up around the

house. Sometimes you're even allowed to go into town

to shop to run errands at one point you'll be allowed to have a job a real job making real money

people who know your face and know where you live people who could help you but you don't tell

them what's happening to you you don't leave leave. You can't. In the early months of

your kidnapping, the man explained it to you. You were now a slave and one of many, part of a human

trafficking ring known as the company. The company dealt in flesh and young women like you

and made sure that they stayed with their owners. For a registration fee that your kidnapper

paid, they promised to track you down if you managed to escape and to put you through torture

far worse than anything you'd experienced at his hands. And if you tried to tell anyone what was

happening with you, they would kill them as well. They had the house bugged. They had your family's houses bugged.

...