Tayler Park

“He could love her all he wanted—but he couldn’t protect her.”
― Kay Lyons, Not by Sight

“Years ago, a woman named Amanda Holmes also vanished in Langley Woods. She went missing from the area. I remember that she was twenty-two at the time, a senior in college. Her case was strange, the kind that captured national attention. It was all over the news. I followed her story at the time because it was interesting. I didn’t think it would ever matter to me on a more personal level. When Amanda first went missing, her car was found about a quarter mile from Langley Woods. There was a suicide note set on the dashboard. The search for her should have been cut-and-dried. It was anything but. Search parties looked for her for days that stretched into weeks. They used bloodhounds and then cadaver dogs to scavenge the woods and the residential areas around them. Even the dogs couldn’t find her. Dozens, if not hundreds, of people searched for Amanda, whose friends called her Mandy, by air and by foot. Her family was devastated. This was maybe five years ago. I remember at the time watching her parents cry on TV. I remember that months passed without finding her. Eventually everyone gave up. People stopped talking about Amanda Holmes. They came to believe that she wasn’t at Langley Woods or anywhere even close to it, that something else had happened to her, something far more mysterious and insidious, but no one knew what. There were theories, and unconfirmed reports of Amanda sightings all over the Chicagoland area and around the country. Had someone met her and driven her elsewhere? Was the suicide note just part of a cunning plan? Had she abandoned her life, her family, and was she living a new life somewhere else? But why? No one knew. The case went cold. A year passed and still she wasn’t found, until one day when some hikers stumbled upon her body in the woods. The medical examiner determined the cause of death: suicide. Amanda Holmes took her own life. She hung herself from a tree. She had been in these woods the whole time everyone was looking for her, and still no one could find her.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple

“Linc was throwing my routine existence out of whack, making me realize the palette I’d been painting with was all shades of gray while he splashed a vibrant rainbow across my canvas. It was beautiful but unsettling, and I needed a second to regain my equilibrium.”
― Catherine Cowles, Beautiful Exile

“I watch the news. I read things. I know that in the United States, women kill their husbands more than they do in almost any other country. For every one hundred men who kill their wives, there are something like seventy-five women who kill their husbands, if not more. Some people say it’s more like fifty-fifty. When men kill their wives, often it starts with some sort of psychological abuse. Stalking. Manipulation. Gaslighting. But when women do it, it’s usually because she’s already determined that she’s going to die if he doesn’t. But that’s not always the case. Women kill for different reasons other than fear or in self-defense. Sometimes they kill because they’re jealous, because they’re worried their spouse is going to leave them, for life insurance payouts, or some combination of the three.”
― Mary Kubica, Just the Nicest Couple