What Evelyn didn’t tell me at the time, what she would, perhaps, have never told the world, was that her career had been waylaid by an unexpected and cruelly unfair breast cancer diagnosis in her late twenties. She had undergone a double mastectomy and suffered countless rounds of chemotherapy, losing crucial writing years and irreplaceable self-confidence. These losses had left her haunted somewhat by the idea, the statistical likelihood, of her own early demise, and she was hungry to make up for lost time on a larger project, one that might leave her mark on the world. Fiction held no more interest for her, she said, real life was terrifying enough. Her new worldview came with a kind of life-affirming fatalism and a surfeit of gallows humor. When she finally told me about her medical history, she smiled across the table and said, “So how does it feel?”
“How does what feel?” I asked.
“How does it feel to be the only tit left in my life?”
In the spring of 2017, when the buzz for my first book died down, I started to meet Evelyn for coffee, sometimes for drinks, and inevitably talk would turn toward what we were both working on. For me, that meant The Smiling Man, my second novel, with which I was determined to improve upon the first. For Evelyn, it meant something else entirely. She had struggled, she said, to find the right project for her second book, struggled with what she saw as her own slow fade into obscurity, until one day, she’d found herself thinking idly, Well, what happens to those girls who go missing? What happens to the Zoe Nolans of the world? I encouraged her because I could sense her desperation, because I wanted to be kind, but as my focus shifted to my own work, I increasingly found cause to break our dates, excuses not to meet up for coffee or for drinks. When I was writing intensively, I could comfortably go whole weeks without speaking to friends and family, whole months without opening my emails. I routinely lost track of time and people, but perhaps that’s letting myself off the hook too easily. In Evelyn’s one-room squat, in her frayed clothes and stalled projects, I felt like I could see the dim outline of my own future. A future with no more successes and no more highs, just unanswered calls and rejection letters, just limitless, endless lows. Writers can get superstitious about failure, they think it’s contagious. Our conversation cooled and the basis for our friendship devolved into emails where we’d occasionally say hi and not much else. These emails went from weekly occurrences to monthly ones, from quarterly to almost nothing at all. Then, on June 25, 2018, an email arrived in my inbox with an intriguing subject.
True Crime Story.
Evelyn had, she said, taken the extraordinary step of contacting Zoe Nolan’s immediate family, speaking to them first as a human being and later as a writer. With their consent, she’d spent almost twelve months talking with a wider range of Zoe’s friends and acquaintances, interviewing everyone she could find, anyone who’d speak to her on the record. And as she did, a complex, contradictory picture began to emerge. Where some versions of events overlapped, aligning perfectly with one another, others stood in stark contrast, giving rise to troubling inconsistencies. There were the bitter disappointments that had led Zoe to the degree course where she was, in fact, struggling. There was the criminal boyfriend who refused to leave Zoe alone but admittedly never loved her. There was the unrelenting pressure from Zoe’s parents and the strained, destructive relationship she shared with her twin sister. And then there was the so-called Shadow Man, who stalked Zoe through the city, tracking her every move…
What there clearly was not was any kind of conclusion.
Dwelling on Evelyn’s physical and mental well-being, I felt guilty for having encouraged her down this path in the first place, encouraging her to invest precious time in some unfulfilling and unanswerable mystery. So, to my shame, the email marked True Crime Story went unanswered, and the attachment that Evelyn hoped to use as the first third of this book went unread.
When a stunning new development threw much of the established narrative of the Zoe Nolan case into question some six months later, I got back in touch with Evelyn, suggesting that perhaps she’d been right all along. She responded quickly, telling me not to read her original file yet, telling me that this new information had shaken loose an important and previously obscured element of her story—that she had finally found the perfect opening for her book…
As I requested and then read this new opening, as I greedily started to work my way through Evelyn’s original chapters, I began to see what she had. That even those closest to Zoe Nolan hadn’t known her empirical truth or, perhaps, that they had each known only their own part of it. I began to understand how Zoe had been forced to keep secrets from those she loved and, perhaps, how she could ultimately even disappear into thin air. Some of the interviewees tended old grudges like garden plots, some of them saw events in a harsh new light. Evelyn argued that the full story, the real truth about Zoe Nolan, could only be assembled from these disparate threads. That in all the ink spilled during the coverage of the case, so much of that truth had been written between the lines, so much of it had been lost entirely. Evelyn argued for a book that would lay everything bare using the unvarnished words of those involved, contradictions and all, the full story unfolding for readers as it had unfolded for her, one revelation on top of another. She believed in a better world, one where a missing girl might actually mean something, but as I read on, I realized that I didn’t.
I saw that in spite of the corkscrew twists and revelations in Evelyn’s story, there was still no conclusion in sight, and it fell to me to tell her the truth. That all the inconsistencies, all the affairs, all the sex tapes, secrets and lies would mean nothing without an ending. As long as Zoe Nolan was unaccounted for, there was no book. In publishing, as in the world, we’re drowning in dead girls, and I’m afraid that missing ones just don’t cut it. Evelyn had been right that first time we met. Our interests revolve around killers, not victims. “What are you going to do,” I asked her. “Change human nature?” It was my opinion that with a mere missing person, without a dead body, without even a verifiable crime, there was no story. I didn’t want to see Evelyn waste what might be precious years of her life researching a doomed, unresolvable narrative, so I said as much. As a result, by mid-February of 2019, our exchanges had grown terse, with Evelyn’s in particular becoming paranoid, cynical, and at times even disturbing.
So sadly, I didn’t believe her when she told me she was getting close to something, and I didn’t believe her when her own shadow man came knocking at the door. When Evelyn finally found her proof, when she finally went to confront the person she believed to be responsible for Zoe’s disappearance—when she told me that she no longer felt physically well—I was preoccupied, slow to act. Cynically, I’d warned her that this story needed a dead body at the end if it was ever to be told. By the close of March 25, 2019, there were two of them.