Read the Prologue.

The hallways were so white.

That is what I remember most. The walls, the ceiling, the floor, the doors. White in a way that meant I was not in the world I came from anymore.

I was wearing paper scrubs and a sheet wrapped around my shoulders. The phone was hung on the wall in the hallway. The communal kind, because the patients were not allowed to have their own. I do not remember who told me I could use it. I do not remember walking to it. I just remember standing there with the receiver in my hand and dialing my mother.

She did not answer.

I left a voicemail. I said the words I had been arranging in my head all morning.

Hey mom, it's me. I just want you to know I'm okay.

And then, because she needed to know who was calling, I said the name I believed was mine.

I said Grace.

The thing about dissociation is that it does not announce itself. It is not the dramatic thing you have seen in movies. It is much quieter than that. It is a gradual leaving of yourself in such small increments that by the time you notice you are gone, you are gone. By the time I picked up that phone, I had been gone for days. The body that walked the white hallway was mine. The hands holding the receiver were mine. The name that came out of my mouth was not.

I had become someone else somewhere between my car crossing the border and waking up in this place. The someone else was a woman named Grace.

I believed it completely.

That is the part I need you to hear. I was not lying. I was not performing. I was not using a fake name to protect myself. My nervous system had finished its long careful project of leaving the woman who crossed that border, and it had arrived at a different person on the other side. The mind followed the body. The mouth said what the mind believed. Grace was who I was.

I hung up the phone. I went back to my room. I waited.

When my mother called back, the nurse came and got me. Your mom is on the phone for you. I walked back down the hallway. I picked up the receiver. I heard her voice for the first time in I did not know how many days.

What I felt was relief and the opposite of relief at the same time. Relief because I knew that voice. Not relief because the body knew, even if I did not, that hearing her voice meant something had gone very fucking wrong.

She did not say much. She said she was coming to California the next day. And before she hung up, she said the sentence that is the reason this book exists.

Sweetie, your name is Carrie. You are Carrie.

I held the receiver. I heard the words. I could not make them mean anything.

Carrie.

The name sat there in the air between us. It would not attach to me. My mother was telling me who I was and I could not access who that was. The woman on the other end of the line knew something I did not, and what she knew was the thing that should have been the most basic and unshakable piece of information available to a person. My own name.

For several days after that call, I signed my name as Grace on the hospital paperwork. I introduced myself as Grace to the staff. The nurses, after talking to my mother, started gently correcting me. Honey, your name is Carrie. I would nod. I would say okay. And then a few hours later I would forget again and tell the next person my name was Grace.

It was not until two of my friends arrived that the truth began to land. They walked into the white room and called me by my real name and something in my body finally recognized what was happening. Not all at once. In pieces. The reassembly took days. Even after I knew, intellectually, that I was Carrie, I had to keep reminding myself. The dissociation had been so complete that coming back to my own name was something my brain had to do on purpose, one moment of recognition at a time.

I am beginning this book here, in the white hallway with the phone receiver in my hand, for one reason.

Because if you are going to read what follows, you need to know first what was at the end of the road. Not the kidnapping. Not the psych hospital. Not the missing persons report or the car at the border. Those are the surface events. The road they were at the end of had started more than thirty years before, on a staircase in the dark, when a six-year-old girl learned that the safest thing to do in her own home was to stop being entirely present in it. The dissociation that took my name in Tijuana was the same dissociation that had been running underneath my entire life.

The Mexico trip was not the moment of breaking. It was the moment the breaking became impossible to ignore.

I had been not-quite-Carrie for a very long time before I became Grace.

This is the story of how that happened. How I lost myself one small leaving at a time until I lost the part of me that knew my own name.

And how I found my way back.