It begins with a phone call that Nora Watts has dreaded for fifteen years—since the day she gave up her newborn daughter for adoption. Bonnie has vanished. The police consider her a chronic runaway and aren’t looking for her, leaving her desperate adoptive parents to reach out to her birth mother as a last hope.

A biracial product of the foster system, transient, homeless, scarred by a past filled with pain and violence, and cursed with unnervingly dark eyes that absorb the light around them—and can pierce deep into a person’s soul—Nora knows intimately what happens to vulnerable girls on the streets. Caring despite herself, she sets out to find Bonnie with her mutt, Whisper, as her only companion. While she risks reopening wounds that have never really healed, she plunges into the darkness with little to protect her but her instincts and a freakish ability to detect truth from lies.

The search uncovers a puzzling conspiracy that leads Nora on a harrowing journey of deception and violence, from the gloomy rain-soaked streets of Vancouver to the icy white mountains of the Canadian interior, to the beautiful and dangerous island where she will face her most terrifying demon. All to save a girl she wished had never been born.