I've spent most of my adult life in rooms that most people pretend don't exist.

Rooms where survivors of domestic violence decided whether it was safe to leave. Rooms where trafficked women learned they were allowed to say what happened to them. And rooms where the men who committed the violence sat across from me and tried to explain why.

I walked into those rooms because I already knew what was on the other side of the door. I am a survivor of abuse — sexual assault, domestic violence, the full spectrum of what humans are capable of doing to each other. That's not the whole story, but it's where the story starts. It's why I spent over a decade as a subject matter expert in family safety — the person case workers called when they couldn't solve the problem. Sexual assault. Human trafficking. Domestic violence. Runaways. The cases nobody else knew how to handle.

I have witnessed the moment a family separated by war and circumstance was made whole again. The sound a parent makes when they hold their child after years of separation is unlike anything else in human experience. I still cry when I think about it. That moment is crystallized in my soul. It is the reason I understand, at the deepest level, what it means when a child is found.

THE DOCUMENTATION is a psychological thriller about the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women crisis — about who disappears, who looks the other way, and what one woman will sacrifice to save a child the system was designed to lose. I developed the Indigenous characters and cultural elements in close collaboration with cultural consultant Carrie Parmeter, because the communities at the heart of this story deserve nothing less than the truth.

I live in the California desert, near the ancient petroglyphs and military installations that shape the world of the Spiral Trilogy. I write thrillers first and let the truth do its own work.