I wanted to write about a woman’s disappearance in a time that wasn’t yet complicated by cell phones, internet, and Nancy Grace—and I wanted to write about a kind of childhood that is perhaps harder to find now, even in small towns like the one I grew up in. When I realized that Tony was black—and this wasn’t something I immediately knew about him—it made sense, too, because I could capture his story at a time when he would have been able to have the illusion of equality, but the racism would have been less coded.