Why is it set a year before the book’s action? I don’t know how much of this was conscious thought at the time, but there was a nice symmetry to beginning the book around Halloween and ending at Thanksgiving, even if I was going back a year in time to do so, and I wanted to be able to show Ronnie alive, full of life. Also, this is the only time in the book that the reader gets to see an actual scene play out between Susanna and Ronnie, and that relationship between them is so important to the novel. I thought it was also nice to build a scene around the photograph that Susanna ends up using for Ronnie’s MISSING posters—to know what was going through Ronnie’s head at the moment it was taken.