For me, every story starts with someone’s voice. Sometimes it’s loud, insistent, and fully formed from the start. Vida Henrikson was born fully formed into my imagination. Sometimes it’s quieter, a murmur in the background, waiting for me to notice it.
Sadie was definitely the second kind.
When Witness was just a seed of an idea, I didn’t yet know the details of the plot. What I did know was that I wanted to write about an ordinary person caught up in something extraordinary, someone who wasn’t a detective, a lawyer, or a professional investigator. I wanted the reader to experience the story through the eyes of someone like them. I’ve always enjoyed Domestic Noir, and like how close these stories can be to our every day lives, so that’s how Sadie arrived: a teacher, a wife, a stepmother, a friend. She’s the sort of woman you might stand next to in the supermarket queue or sit beside on the bus without ever guessing how much she’s carrying beneath the surface. I hope she’s the kind of person you’d like to go out with… although maybe not by the time you’ve experienced everything she does through!
Sadie’s world is very familiar to me and grounded: lesson plans, family dinners, weekend errands. But she’s also curious by nature, with a quiet resilience that runs deeper than she realises. And when she sees something, something she can’t quite explain and can’t easily forget, she has to decide what to do with it.
The challenge with writing Sadie was making her both relatable and complex. She’s not perfect. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Sometimes I’d find her doing stuff and, like her friends in the story, would want to shout ‘Stop being so stupid!’ I’m sure there’ll be points where you’re shouting the same thing at the page. She can be stubborn, she makes mistakes (many mistakes!) and she doesn’t always say the right thing. But she cares deeply about the people in her life, and she believes in doing what’s right, even when that belief comes at a cost.
Through Sadie’s eyes, Witness explores questions I kept asking myself while writing:
- What does it mean to speak up when it would be easier to stay silent?
- How far would you go to protect the life you’ve built?
- And what happens when the truth you’re telling isn’t the truth people want to hear?
Sadie might be fictional, but she feels real to me, the kind of character I can imagine bumping into in real life. When you meet her on the page, I hope you’ll see pieces of yourself, or of someone you know, in her. And I hope, when the tension rises and the stakes climb higher, you’ll be rooting for her as much as I was while I wrote her story.
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