In the pages of Ethan’s book, my alter ego is Enderly Atwood, a spunky eighteen-year-old with curly rose hair and peridot eyes. My fictional doppelgänger. Like other young women her age, she’s energetic and inquisitive, traits her father warns must be managed lest they get her into trouble. But unlike most, Enderly’s entire world is confined inside the boundaries of Camp Indigo, the secretive commune on the rural outskirts of Doser, Pennsylvania. It isn’t until an intrepid journalist infiltrates Indigo that Enderly learns the unsettling truth beneath the empire of ashes she’s called home, and must help the journalist reveal the cult’s founder, her father, for the dangerous tyrant he is—before it’s too late. A work of fiction loosely based on Massasauga and Ethan’s interviews with my father, the Times called The Cult of Silence, “A suspenseful departure from the rational world into a disquieting realm of ego and manipulation, revealing the limits of the human psyche.”

But it was upstate New York where we called two hundred acres of the Adirondack region home. I was only twelve when it all came to an end. And it wasn’t an undercover journalist who drove my father to murder eleven of his followers, just his own metastasizing paranoia. Though Ethan does nail my father’s tendency toward self-aggrandizing speeches that appeared mid-conversation as if ejected from a passing aircraft. Ethan captures the essence of his natural charisma and the dark shadow of intimidation he cast over us.

Until today, I had never been tempted to pick up Ethan’s book. I had convinced myself nothing good could come of it. Now it’s after midnight, I’m three chapters in, and more conflicted than when I began.

Sitting in bed, my phone buzzes.

I put a scrap of paper between the pages to save my place.

So far, there’s nothing about his book I find offensive, exactly. His writing is clever and thoughtful. But I already knew that. I’m sure Ethan has no shortage of sycophants lining up to kiss his ass. I won’t be one of them. And there’s just one question that I’ve been dying to ask for more than a year.

I’ll give him that. Some male writers seem to suffer from a kind of creative paralysis when writing about women. Depicting hollow renditions of the same female tropes regurgitated ad nauseam. But Enderly has dimension. She’s complex and at times contradictory—a woman at odds with herself. That much, at least, I can relate to.

I don’t hold animosity toward Ethan, per se. Most of the time, the idea of him doesn’t even cross my mind. And it isn’t his reputation that intimidates me. The breathless vacuum of standing in the presence of fame. That eerie uncanny valley of witnessing in the flesh something that formerly only existed at a comfortable distance through a television screen or in the glossy pages of a magazine. This nervous sensation that tingles my spine and turns my fingertips numb—it’s dread. The specific and daunting fear of what’s not said.

Three years ago Ethan rose to prominence after publishing a six-page feature about the Massasauga Massacre. The result of his interviews with my father. Ethan was the first to get him on record, for weeks traveling upstate to Sing Sing, where Patrick Turner Murphy sits serving out eleven life sentences for his eleven victims. I don’t know how Ethan got him to talk. Neither my father nor any of the survivors had ever spoken a word to the media in the decade since the event. That’s where the title of the book comes from. The Cult of Silence was a nickname coined by the press at the time.

But it wasn’t reading my father’s words that disturbed me. Most of the article painted him as a paranoid narcissist rather than the compelling villain of myth previously portrayed in made-for-TV movies. Instead, it was my father’s pervasive preoccupation with me that caused the cold sweat. Though I wasn’t mentioned by name, fifteen times I surfaced in the article. Anecdotes of his fond familial memories that bore no resemblance to the reality I remembered. A revisionist history of fatherhood as if he could humanize the monster behind the mask. And yet, that’s still not the part that claws at me. Not what Ethan wrote about me for all the world to read. It’s what he didn’t write.

Eight weeks is a lot of conversation to fit into one article. How much more did my father tell him that didn’t make it to print? How many more stories of my childhood has Ethan withheld? The years too young and too long ago to remember. Empty spaces between the lines. To this day, my mother doesn’t talk about a time before we escaped Massasauga. And when the memories fade, it’s like it never happened.

The fear is that Ethan knows more about me than I do.