Chapter 1

How My Novel Was Born

Sunlight filled the house and I stood still. My husband was in his music studio on the third floor, creating magic, and I was near the front door but standing in the living room when the idea came through me.

I had finished watching a documentary about an orphanage in Thailand founded by American Christians the day before. Now, questions were stirring.

“What,” I wondered, “would happen if the do-gooders didn’t vet their volunteers thoroughly and just accepted them based on shared faith alone? And what,” I mused, “would happen if they recruited a slightly unhinged person into their ranks and left her in charge of the children? How would she cope?”

Years earlier when I had traveled to Thailand, I had been so blinded by the stunning beauty of the temples and beaches, I hadn’t noticed the trafficking till it was right under my nose. While lounging poolside at a hotel in Chiang Mai and ironically reading the book, Sex Slaves by Louise Brown, the coin suddenly dropped. The woman on the phone only a few chairs from me shouting in Thai, was actually directing the many teens wearing skimpy bikinis scattered around me. She would give the signal and one of them would leave the longest and loudest show of bravado and “fun” and splashing in the pool to walk upstairs and disappear into one of the rooms. These kids were hers. The boy with the Speedo tucked into his cheeks walking the perimeter of the pool provocatively and mocking me in Thai, was not actually empowered and free. He followed her orders to go into this room, then that, too. I watched it all unfold right before my eyes. As they continued their confusing ritual of entering and exiting hotel rooms I realized where I had booked myself a room. I was staying at a brothel.

I wondered if I could answer the questions that had arisen by writing that story.

“No,” I reasoned, “that’s too dark.”

It would take the loss of two pregnancies and then the additional grief of losing my husband to make me a match for the darkness. In the bleak solitude of the pandemic I began to write about the woman who would accept a position in an orphanage in Thailand just after her life at home had imploded. I named her Tabby. And so my novel began its gestation.