I HAD NOT EVEN heard of Dr. Phil McGraw before I was kidnapped. After several years in Castro’s house, when the three of us were able to watch television, I saw snippets of some of his shows—a few minutes here and a few minutes there—as long as they didn’t have any African Americans on them. Castro was a bigot who hated all people of color and would punish us if we watched any TV show with African Americans.

But at least I knew about Dr. Phil when my lawyer told me about the request to go on the show for a one-on-one interview about what I had gone through. I thought hard about it. I knew that describing my experience would be tough, but I always believed mine was a story that had to be told. This was another way to do it, different from reporters writing down what you say and different too from writing a book. All I had to do was answer questions. I said yes.

The interview was to take place in California—in a quiet, secluded location where I would feel protected. As everybody knows, Dr. Phil is a big man with a deep voice and a forthright manner. I felt like an ant next to him. I was still uneasy around men, but he is such a kind and reassuring guy that he put me at ease.

The taping took place over a couple of days in October. The set was a living room. I settled myself cross-legged on the sofa while Dr. Phil sat opposite me in a chair. Of course I was nervous at first. He asked question after question. He asked softly. He reacted quietly but with feeling. Talking to him got easier with each question. I felt okay—I felt safe—about sharing my story with him.

We talked first about Castro’s abduction of me, about being chained to that pole in the filthy basement of the house, about being tied up like a fish and hung like a hammock by an orange extension cord. We talked about how I realized, even in those first months of captivity, that because I knew his name and his face, Castro could never let me go free without ending up in prison himself. After a time we talked about when first Gina and then Amanda arrived in the house, about the growing bond between Gina and me, and about how Castro always singled me out for the worst beatings—as we all knew, because I refused to break no matter what he did.

Those two days of the interview were hard going, as I had expected they would be, but I felt good to have done it. Dr. Phil said something afterward that meant a lot to me. “I started this by thinking that I was sitting down with a brave and courageous young woman,” he said. “And after spending these few days with you here, I now know that brave and courageous are not big enough words to describe you.” His words made me feel almost his size. In turn, I had come to feel that he really cared about my life and where I was going with it. When he told me I could call him any time, I believed him. It was real.

The interview was televised over two days too. The first hour, shown on Tuesday, November 5, was the part about my abduction and the years before Gina and Amanda. The second part was on Wednesday, November 6, about relationships among the three of us and how I was singled out for brutality because I was unbreakable. That Saturday, November 9, both parts were rebroadcast as a two-hour special. The audience for these shows was huge all over the country but especially in northeast Ohio. It meant that just as I got ready to move into my new apartment and start trying to live a normal life, there was no way I could escape celebrity.

Mine was a funny kind of celebrity too. I hadn’t achieved something special through talent and hard work. I’m no movie star, and as for athletic ability, I’m not exactly LeBron James. That’s not the kind of celebrity I am. I’m known for having survived something horrible, for having been terrorized by a human monster and having refused to become a victim. Now I was trying to reclaim my life, but feeling people staring at me every time I walked outside wasn’t helping. In fact, it was scaring me.

When I had first begun looking at apartments, a chief concern was security. That meant many different things to me. First, I wanted to be in a lively neighborhood where there were lots of people around, plenty of activity, and plenty of good lighting. Shadows and empty spaces were a turnoff. I also decided I would look mostly at recently constructed buildings that would have lots of up-to-date features and amenities. I figured that such buildings would also have the latest security measures.

What actually first attracted me to the building I would eventually move into was that it was in a complex filled with athletes. A number of players on Cleveland’s professional baseball, football, and basketball teams had apartments there, and the building management was very concerned with protecting their privacy and keeping any “fans” out of range of the tenants and off the premises. That meant heavy security: key fobs for entry, a twenty-four-hour guard in the lobby of the building, cameras tracking traffic coming in and going out. That was a real attraction, and when I was shown the apartment—a one-bedroom with a full living room and a gorgeous country-style kitchen—I decided this was home. I signed a one-year lease, packed up my few belongings, and moved in—just in time for Thanksgiving.

I still needed help to furnish and decorate the apartment, and you know who provided that help? Dr. Phil. He kind of took me shopping—well, not in person, which isn’t possible when you run a daily television show—but he arranged it all. He sent two assistants—blonde, pretty, unbelievably efficient—to help me get it done. And believe me, if you’re an assistant for Dr. Phil, you really know how to get things done. They hired a car service, and off we went, spending hours in Macy’s and Value City buying furniture, pots and pans, even new clothes—absolutely every last possible thing a person could need. A key goal was to make sure things matched—the dining room furniture and the living room furniture and the bedroom set too. I didn’t want anything to be “out of order.” And nothing was. Dr. Phil asked me to send photos of “your gorgeous new apartment,” which of course I did. I will always be grateful to him for that boost to help me start a new life.

I NEEDED A BOOST. Much as I had craved being downtown and on my own, neither was easy. I lacked what people call a “support group,” which I’ve always thought was just another term for friends and family. I knew there was no support possible from my family, but as I was winding down my time at the assisted-living facility, I did reach out to some old friends from my childhood.

In particular, I wanted to reconnect with the person I thought of as my best friend from high school. When I started looking for a place to live, she offered space in her apartment. It made sense. She was a single mom at the time, and the way she put it, sharing a place would work for both of us. “I could use some help with the rent,” she said, “and it would give you a place for yourself and your things while you look for a permanent home.” It sounded to me like a good deal, and what could be easier than striking a deal with someone you’ve known since you were a kid in high school?

But it didn’t work out. It seemed to me that she was only interested in getting money to pay the rent, and the whole thing ended badly. Some people come into your life as a lesson. My “bestie” from high school was a lesson that you can’t trust someone just because you were kids together.

My so-called cousin was another lesson. She wanted to write her own book about “our” family. But rather than help, I got the definite impression that she was only interested in my celebrity status. I disconnected that family “connection” pretty quickly.

I saw both these failures as betrayals. It’s a harsh word, but that’s how I felt. How can you not think that an old friend and a cousin will be anything other than glad to help in your time of need? Where else should you turn when you need a lift up—especially when you’re just barely holding yourself together after hitting rock bottom? Both experiences felt like blows, and I grew more determined than ever to break with everything in my past and find a new way of life peopled with new friends.

The complex that included my building had just about everything anyone needed: restaurants, gyms, even a hair salon. You almost never had to leave the complex at all, but if you did, there were all sorts of stores and markets right in the neighborhood within easy walking distance. Because I couldn’t drive and was still too frightened to get into a taxi, that was certainly useful.

I remember opening the door that first day after everything had been delivered. I stood looking at my shiny furniture, smelling that new couch smell. I was so excited to have a place of my own. I had done it! I had the privacy I craved. I didn’t have to answer to anyone or defer to anyone. There was no one to tell me what to do or when to do it, no one wandering into my space as if they owned it, no one commenting on my habits or activities, no one talking to me or at me for any reason.

And as soon as I moved in, I was terrified. I had finally gotten my wish to be alone, and what I felt was lonely. I tried to say “hi” to everybody I passed in the building or around the complex—a lot of people must have thought I was kind of kooky.

I began to realize that freedom was a funny thing. I was free in the sense that I was away from the horrors of Castro’s house and the abuse of my family. And I was free to choose where and how I would live. I could do anything I was capable of—take a walk, learn to fly, get a pet, sing, dance, vote. But I couldn’t walk out on the street without being recognized.

People stared. Once, when I was first taken to shop for clothes, I noticed another shopper, a woman, snapping photos of me with her phone while I was in the changing room. I asked her, politely, to please stop.

“This is a public area,” she said. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

“What would you think,” I asked her, “if someone took pictures of you while you were trying on clothes?”

“I don’t care what people think of me,” she said. I had to get the store manager over, and she asked the woman to leave. It certainly soured my shopping experience.

But it was my first lesson—and far from the last—that if you are in the public eye, people sometimes think they own you or that you owe them something. I guess with my story having become national news—even international news—I couldn’t expect complete privacy. But every human being needs space to breathe. When I felt cameras closing in on me, it was almost like being in captivity all over again. And it was scary.

In the end, that became true even of the well-wishers who came up to me when I just went outside for a bit to stretch my legs on a walk around the neighborhood.

“I just want to tell you how happy I am that you were found,” people would say. Or they would come up to me and tell me I was an “inspiration” to them. Many told me they prayed for me. I was grateful for the kind feelings. Their good wishes meant a lot to me. Still, knowing that people are looking at you all the time can put an awful lot of pressure on what you were hoping would be a casual walk outside. The attention can also make you feel vulnerable, and that reinforced my own fear of ever leaving the safe boundaries of the complex.

What I hadn’t yet learned were the responsibilities of being free—the responsibility to confront reality, to believe in something other than evil, to teach myself how to take toxic people out of my life and put positive people back in. Developing that internal guidance system would take time.

So at first, mostly, I stayed home. In the apartment I unwrapped new art supplies I had bought and took pleasure in drawing and painting. Or I wrote in my new pink journal. When I felt myself going stir-crazy, I would go out to one of the restaurants in the complex, have a meal and a couple of drinks, and just come home.

I started a Facebook page—photo, profile, the whole thing. It exploded. Hundreds of people found me every day, added me as a friend, and sent me messages of encouragement. Facebook didn’t scare me. The people contacting me on Facebook were from somewhere else; they existed in cyberspace, not on the street where I walked. There was enough distance between us that I didn’t feel threatened.

The month I moved into the apartment was the same month we signed the contract to write the book that would become Finding Me. I didn’t know where or how to begin, but the publisher assigned a professional editor to work with me. That meant long talks on the phone and lots of emails back and forth—and lots of thinking about how to relate what had happened to me over the eleven years of captivity. The pain of those years was never far beneath the surface, and focusing on them the way writing a book makes you focus brought it back pretty intensely. I found myself taking sips of wine during the day, at home, instead of waiting to go out to a restaurant. It numbed the pain just a bit, just enough, I thought, to get through the day. Temporary numbness, that was all.

I felt I needed a new focus and decided to get a job. But everywhere I tried, I was told my “fame” would be a distraction. Like the woman in the clothing shop, people would try to take my photo or would ask for selfies, and no work would get done. Potential employers were kind about the rejections, but they rejected me just the same.

Instead, I started volunteering at a no-kill animal shelter. Even there my celebrity was something of a handicap. But I was happy if I could just spend some time in the back of the shelter shampooing the dogs, clipping their nails, and taking care of them where I didn’t have to be seen.

I decided to take cooking classes. I love to cook. I love doing artsy things with food. I like making flowers out of onions, and I love creating tomato swirls and turning curly fries into snakes. Brandt Evans is a famous chef in Cleveland, and when he heard me say in a television interview that I loved to cook, he invited me to take his class.

I loved what I was learning there, but some of the other students made me uncomfortable. A couple of them couldn’t stop asking me really personal questions about my ordeal in Castro’s house. To say the least, this broke my concentration and distracted me from the work we were all trying to do. In addition, I was still allergic to many of the ingredients—mustard, for example, and even salt—so that I often felt nauseous in class. Food smells could sometimes make me sick as well; the smell of beans, rice, and meat mixed with certain spices brought back bad memories and could get me coughing to the point that I would actually throw up. And then being pestered over and over again by a couple of fellow students about things I wanted to forget didn’t help. It was all just another reminder that trying to be a normal person living a normal life was out of reach—for the moment anyway. Reluctantly, and always grateful to Brandt, I quit the cooking class, deciding I would just cook at home.

Besides the allergies, I still confronted terrible phobias that Castro had drilled into me. The reaction to certain food smells was bad enough. But I was also terrified of motorcycle helmets because Castro had used one to limit my sight and my movement. And I was horribly afraid of cloth napkins. That whole first year after my rescue, whenever I would go to a nice restaurant, I would have to ask for a paper napkin instead of the cloth one. Cloth was what Castro would shove into my mouth so I couldn’t scream whenever he had people over to his house. One time he shoved a cloth napkin so far down the back of my mouth and into my throat that I could barely breathe. I began weeping, and this just made things worse because crying contracted my throat around the napkin. When he finally pulled the napkin out of my mouth, it was soaked with blood.

It would take a long time before I could overcome any of these fears. I had to ease forward in steps. With the napkin, the first step was just to leave it there on the table while I ate. The next step was to touch it. Finally, after a few more times, I was able to put the napkin on my lap. The same with the motorcycle helmet. First, I had to teach myself to look at one without getting a panic attack. My method was to make sure any helmet was not within reach, was just something I could see. Slowly and gradually I was able to look at helmets, then, after a while, to touch one, and eventually to wear one and ride a motorcycle—a great thrill for me. In time I got used to some of the food smells as well. Overcoming these phobias was for me a victory over my torturer. I could say to myself that he had not won after all; he had not broken me. He had lost. I had won. The fear he had used as a weapon would never, ever control me.

THAT FIRST CHRISTMAS as a free woman I bought a white Christmas tree and lots of lights and lit up my apartment like crazy. It was a quiet holiday, and of course my heart was with Joey, wherever he was. But I was glad to count my blessings. I was free, I was whole, I was putting my life back together.

Early in the new year I even took my first trip to New York City, with my lawyer, to meet with “my” publisher. It was my first-ever ride on an airplane too, and before I ever got on the plane I had a mildly disastrous but mostly kind of funny experience—namely, a brush with the security folks at the airport in Cleveland. The trip was to last a few days, and I had packed enough to stay for a month. But I somehow managed to lift my carry-on up onto the conveyor belt, and off it went on its way through the X-ray machine. There was an awful grumbling sound from the machine, and one of the TSA agents asked me to “please step aside, ma’am.”

“You have liquids in your suitcase,” she announced to me. I sure did. I had a bottle of water and a bottle of mouthwash packed away, plus a tube of toothpaste. All of them were prohibited items to bring on a plane, not because of what they were but because the containers were bigger than 3.4 ounces. I had had absolutely no idea. The agent gave me a choice: “You’ll either have to check the suitcase, or I will need to confiscate these items and throw them out.”

Go back and check the bag? Throw the stuff out? I couldn’t believe it. What for? “I didn’t know I couldn’t have liquids,” I protested to the agent.

For a minute she didn’t say anything, just stared at me. Then, in a tone that sounded like she either didn’t believe me or thought I was conning her, she said, “Ma’am, this has been the rule for the last ten years at least!”

That’s when my lawyer took over. “You have no idea,” she said to the TSA agent, “where this woman has been for the last ten years.”

She and I both cracked up, and then my lawyer explained it all to the agent. Of course, she knew about me and Gina and Amanda and the whole story. She seemed embarrassed, but she managed to chuckle. “I apologize for scaring the crap out of you,” she said.

“That’s okay,” I told her. “Crap happens.”

I handed over the prohibited items, and we took off. I figured New York would have everything I needed, and of course it did. It was amazing to be there. In a plush office in a real publishing firm, I met with my agent and the team who would be helping me produce a book. I saw the sights, and I even saw my first Broadway show—Kinky Boots—and got to go backstage afterward to meet the cast. Talk about amazing!

Not long after I got back to Cleveland I got a call from a friend inviting me to a birthday party downtown, not far from the apartment complex where I lived. I had met this friend, Gina Baker, when I was at the hospice and had first started going out to clubs with Anita and Erna. So she was part of a little group I had always felt very comfortable with and liked very much, and I figured that because it was probably time I reconnected with other people, this was the crowd to do it with. I said yes. It was my first real “night out” since moving into the apartment, and I ended up having a great time. Having gone straight from high school to motherhood to captivity, I had never really known how good it can be to party and have fun, so it was a kind of discovery for me, one I liked very much.

From that moment on, there was no stopping me. I enjoyed meeting new people, although of course it was more that they were new to me. I wasn’t new to them because they had all seen the Dr. Phil interviews, seen the headlines and follow-up stories, and were familiar with lots of details about my captivity and rescue. But it felt good to show up at some noisy club, get together with people who were becoming regular acquaintances, and meet new people night after night. I guess this is what people do in their late teens and twenties—all the nightly or weekend partying that I had missed. And I guess now I was making up for it. You could say I squeezed my twenties into the first year after my rescue. I may have squeezed in too much at times, but it was a valuable learning experience.

Just about my favorite place was the Corner Alley, not far from my apartment complex. It’s a bowling alley/sports bar/restaurant/game room all rolled into one, and it is really a fun place to go. For me, what made it even better was that the staff there got to know me and grew pretty protective of me. One of the employees walked me home one night when there was a kind of noisy crowd outside, and some of the folks who worked there would check the streets outside before I headed home. It was frustrating to think that kind of protectiveness was necessary, but it felt good to know it was there.

One night, after a few rounds of bowling, I wandered into the House of Blues, the karaoke spot near where I lived. I had passed it a million times, but tonight, when everything downtown seemed to be crazy busy, I could hear people belting it out inside and thought I’d like to listen more closely, so I pulled open the doors and walked in. It turned out to be one of the best moves of my life because it brought me into contact with two of my closest and dearest friends.

When I walked in I saw a man who looked to be in his fifties coming toward me. I always got nervous when people approached me; I always wondered what they might ask me and what their manner would be.

“I’m Jim,” he said. “What are you going to sing tonight?”

There is only one word for the way Jim looks at you: kind. “Oh,” I said, “I don’t know. I’m not even sure I feel like singing right now.”

“But I just know you have a pretty voice,” Jim said. “Go on up there and sing. No need to be afraid of anybody here. We all love you.”

I muttered that I was having vision problems. “I’m not sure I’d even be able to see the words.”

He nodded, then he grinned. “There’s a song I like that I bet you would know. Will you sing it with me?” The song was “Summer Nights” from Grease, and we sang it together—my karaoke debut. I don’t think Olivia and John need to worry about the competition, but it was uplifting to stand there and sing the song with that wonderful man. I sang most of it from memory because I couldn’t entirely see or hear the words.

When the song ended, someone in the audience shouted out to me: “Sing ‘Roar’! Can you sing ‘Roar’ for me? It would be so powerful to hear you sing that song.” I barely knew the song, but the woman in the audience was shrieking, “She’s gonna sing my song, she’s gonna sing my song!” Kenny, the DJ at House of Blues, had caught on to my problem and had figured out what I needed in order to follow along, so he played the song softly enough that I could feel the vibrations and hear some of the words. And then, as I sang it, I realized that it was a powerful song for me. It told my story. Held down, I had gotten up. I was a fighter, and I am a champion, and as I stood there singing, I felt that I really did have the eye of the tiger and that I was roaring like a lion. I think everybody who heard me sing that song that night felt so too.

I still sing “Roar” at karaoke nights with friends. Whenever I do, Jim cries, but he assures me they’re tears of joy.

After the singing Jim and I sat and talked. And talked and talked. For hours. It felt like I had always known him, but I almost couldn’t trust that feeling because—well, first because he was a man—still hard for me to feel calm about—and because of my ongoing fear that, like a lot of people, he might want something from me. I never really had a father, but as Jim and I kept talking, that was the word that kept coming into my mind. It came into my mind even more strongly when he walked me home because he said it was too late for me to walk by myself. When we got to my building he asked, “Are you going to come to karaoke next week?”

“Why not?” I said. And I did. Jim and Kenny and I grew our friendship over those next weeks and months. Around this time I was really behaving like a party animal, and both of them kept an eye on me and looked out for my well-­being. Jim always made sure I got home safely and took extra care when I had had one drink too many—easy to do when you’re my size—and both showed me that there are men in this world who do not misuse women or dishonor trust.

Years later Jim would write about how, when he first saw me, he “felt an immediate need to protect her, like an older brother or a dad.” He wrote that although I seemed “outgoing and vibrant, ready to take on the world,” he sensed that “inside, it was the total opposite. She still lived in fear, very hesitant to trust, especially men.” Clearly Jim could see inside my soul back then. He still can.

Together we sometimes sing the song that has meant more to me than any other, “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion. It is the song that saved my life when I was in Castro’s house. I had reached perhaps the lowest point in eleven years of misery. I just didn’t want to live anymore. I was wondering how I could find a way to kill myself when, suddenly, the song came on the radio. I listened to the lyrics, and I wondered, What would Joey think if he learned his mother killed herself? Could his heart go on if he knew his mother had taken her life? If he believed his mother had not seen him as a reason to stay alive? That thought—that song—stopped me. It represented my son to me. It represented my love for him. This is what I had told Dr. Phil in our interview, and it is what I told Celine Dion in person when we met.

When I first described my history with that song to Jim, he urged me to sing it. He spoke as if I had to sing it—for my own sake, and for my son’s. So I did. Kenny again did the music, low, so only I could hear it. You can’t sing if you’re crying, so I kept the sobs out of my voice, but the tears rolled down my face anyway as I sang. The tears were for Joey, whom I missed so much, and they were tears of relief that I had not given in to the darkness on those days when I wanted to die. I was alive, and I had friends—these two wonderful men backing me up as I sang this song as if my life depended on it, as it once had. I had a lot to be thankful for.

NOT ALL the people I met in those partying days were as wonderful. Not even close. In fact, as the weeks and months wore on, I realized a couple of important things. One was that I was drinking too much with my new friends—drinking too much without them as well. The other was that a lot of my new friends were friends to my face but not behind my back.

I finally began to realize that I went out with a lot of these people just because they asked me. Someone would call, I would be feeling lonely with nothing to do, and I’d just go and meet up with them instead of staying home alone. They would all want me to tell “my story,” but if I thought that confiding in people would mean they would be understanding and would have my back, I was dead wrong. What a lot of them wanted was to show off—“Look who I’m with. I’m with Michelle Knight.” And then behind my back they’d be calling me stupid because, as one said, I “let this happen” to me. I realized they were there not for friendship but for what they could get out of being with me. New friends, I was learning, could be as disappointing as old friends had turned out to be.

I guess I first noticed it one night at House of Blues when I was there with a good-sized bunch of “friends,” all gathered around a table. One by one, each of them went outside for a cigarette, or so they said. I was cool with that; most of these new friends smoked, so they would often go outside, then come back in. But this time everyone was gone for longer than it takes to smoke a cigarette. Fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes. Thirty.

So I walked out there, and they were gone. I went back in and paid what I owed. The management at the House of Blues knew me well by this time, and I told them, “You know me. I always pay my way, but I don’t pay for anybody else’s bill. When you see those people next time, make them pay what they owe.” Management agreed.

There it was again—that thing that says if you’re “famous,” you’re a target. I was famous for having been tortured and abused for eleven years, and now people were trying to do it again. That’s how I saw it. They were trying to take advantage of me, and they thought they could. It made me angry, and it made me feel unsafe. I was getting tired of people coming into my life with what I thought of as a fake mask that covered who they truly were and thinking it was okay to take advantage of me and hurt me. It wasn’t. But I had to let go—to forgive others for their cruelty and forgive myself for bad judgment. I couldn’t let it consume me.

One day, not long afterward, I was walking to my favorite cupcake store to get a treat. I had just crossed the street when I heard that awful sound of lots of cars honking at once. I turned and saw a young woman crossing the street behind me but against the light. She wore baggy pants and a baggy sweatshirt with a big scarf around her neck, and she had tripped and fallen, which is why the cars had stopped and were honking.

I ran over to her to see if she was okay. She was, so she brushed herself off, and we crossed the street together. She was talking a mile a minute, explaining how she had been trying to reach me so she could talk to me, and we walked together into the cupcake store.

“Oh, Michelle Knight, Michelle Knight,” she was saying. “You are my hero. I just had to meet you! Where do you live?” she asked.

“Not far,” I said, leaving it vague. We ordered cupcakes and talked for a little—well, she talked—as we ate. She said she had just moved to the area and wondered what there was to do. I told her about the Corner Alley and a few other local spots.

And after a bit I gathered my things, told her I had to go, and wished her well.

“Can I come with you?” she asked.

Something now didn’t seem right. “I have an appointment,” I told her, “so that won’t be possible.”

“How about a photo of us together?”

I was used to this, so I said, “Sure,” and she snapped a selfie before I hurried out of the shop. I looked back once I had crossed the street, and there she was, standing in the window of the cupcake shop staring at me. The truth is that I was on my way home, but I darted in and out of different buildings to throw her off in case she was following me.

A few days later, early in the morning, I headed out of my building. My book, Finding Me, had just been published, and I was on my way to an interview. I had on a really nice dress and was wearing high heels. I felt good. It was rush hour, and the streets were filled with people on their way to work. Even in the bustle I could tell that people were stopping to stare at me. I was kind of accustomed to this, but it still made me nervous. Everyone else in the street was allowed to be anonymous—why couldn’t I be too? I had stepped up my pace in a useless attempt to escape the stares and to make it to my interview on time when one heel got caught in a hole in the sidewalk, and the next thing I knew, I was flat on the ground.

People stopped. Many started taking pictures. One pointed and laughed. “She’s drunk!” he said gleefully. I pegged him for an overgrown playground bully.

What is wrong with some people? I thought to myself. Do they want me to fall and be humiliated so they can post the pictures? Why? Will it make them feel better about themselves?

My immediate problem, however, was how to get up—if possible, gracefully. Then someone reached out a hand to me. Gratefully, I took it, stood up, and looked into the face of the woman from the cupcake shop. My heart started racing.

“Michelle Knight, it is so good to see you!” she said. “I have been looking for you!”

“I am late,” I told her. “Thanks for your help. I have to go.” I made a mad dash through the morning commuters to escape.

Up to now I had felt pretty safe in my apartment building. But a few nights later I came home to learn that a woman had come into the lobby, managing to enter without a key while another tenant was exiting. The woman had then walked through the building, asking tenants which apartment was mine. The manager on duty told her that I wasn’t in, but the woman showed the manager my book and said, “I need Michelle Knight to sign my book right now!” He repeated that I was not in and asked her if she wanted to sign in or leave a note. Angrily, she said no and left. Before he even showed me the surveillance tape, I knew who it was. That’s right. Cupcake shop lady.

The next time I went bowling at the Corner Alley I was told a woman had been there asking for me. One of the staff walked me home that night. Having someone by my side to look out for me was not something I wanted, but that evening it was something I needed.

From then on, I went outside only if somebody walked with me. Jim, Kenny, and the Corner Alley employees took turns at this. Pretty much whenever I had to go out in public I would alert one of them, who would then watch the crowd and sometimes even move people away from me. I hated it. I’d been vulnerable all my life. I know that stalkers should be pitied, not despised; I understand they feel a terrible loneliness and rejection. But I was tired of suffering and feeling afraid. All I wanted now was to feel free, yet even in my apartment building I was beginning to act like a caged animal.

That was about to change—big time. Finding Me was published on May 6, 2014, one year to the day after I was rescued. I had spent all my life within a few square miles of Cleveland, Ohio, and I had spent much of my life silenced, both physically and emotionally. But now I was about to embark on a book tour. I was off to see the world, yes, and I was also preparing to speak out about my life—over and over and over again to tell my story of what had happened to me to the millions of people who wanted to hear it.