My family left me behind during a summer trip as a vicious joke, laughing while they drove off and said, “Let’s see if she can handle it.” I never went back, and fifteen years later, when they finally tracked me down, the person I had become left them utterly stunned.

The final memory I had of my family was their laughter drifting farther and farther away down a dusty road in northern Arizona.

I was seventeen, my skin burned from the sun, my throat dry, standing beside a cracked wooden sign that said: Mile 42 Desert View Trail. My stepfather, Richard Hale, had pulled the rental SUV onto the shoulder after I complained that my younger half brother, Mason, had dumped soda inside my backpack. My mother, Linda, let out a weary sigh as though I was the one causing trouble. My older cousin, Brooke, recorded the whole thing on her camcorder.

“Go cool off,” Richard said, throwing my backpack into the dirt.

I assumed he meant for a few minutes.

Then he got back into the SUV.

“Mom?” I said, moving toward them.

Linda looked at me from behind the open window. Her sunglasses covered her eyes. “Maybe this will teach you not to ruin everyone’s vacation, Erin.”

Mason stuck his head out from the back seat and smiled. “Let’s see if she can handle it!”

Brooke laughed so hard the camera trembled.

The SUV began to move.

At first, I did not chase them. I waited to see the brake lights. I waited for Richard to stop, back up, jump out laughing, and admit it had all been a prank. But the red lights vanished around the curve. Heat pressed hard against my face. The desert fell quiet except for the buzz of insects in the brush.

My phone had no battery. My water bottle was still inside the SUV. In my backpack, I had two T-shirts, a paperback book, and one granola bar smashed into crumbs.

By the time the sun went down, I understood something cold and final: they were not coming back that day.

I walked until my legs shook beneath me. A pickup truck passed after dark. I shouted. It kept going. By morning, my lips had cracked open. I followed the road, collapsed near a cattle fence, and woke up to an elderly Navajo woman named Ruth Yazzie tipping water into my mouth from a dented canteen.

She brought me to her trailer outside Kayenta. She called the police. I gave them my name. I told them my family had left me behind.

Two days later, an officer came back wearing an odd expression.

“Your mother reported you missing,” he said. “She claims you ran away after an argument.”

I stared at him, waiting for the joke.

There was none.

Richard told the police I had been unstable. Brooke’s video showed me shouting beside the car, but not the part where they drove away without me. My mother appeared on television crying and begging me to come home.

I watched her act from Ruth’s sofa.

Then I made the first real choice of my life.

I would not return.

The girl they had abandoned died on that road. The woman who survived began studying every lie they spoke, every camera angle, every document, every vulnerable place in their story.

Fifteen years later, when they found me in Washington, D.C., I was not Erin Hale anymore.

I was Special Agent Erin Voss, and I was in charge of the federal investigation into them.

PART 2

Next »