***

The 22-year-old Darya picked up her cell phone after the sixth ring. Her voice was louder, more confident, more patient. She had been expecting my call. We asked about each others' families and well-being. Then I apologized for failing to rescue her from the life she had feared, from Haji Sufi, the man who had become her husband and father of her children. There was a pause.

"I waited a long time for you to come and save me," she said. "But this was my destiny. I'm used to it now," she said, letting out a 10-year sigh.

In 2003, when I first met Darya, her father Touraj had disappeared to avoid traffickers hunting him down. Even after selling two of his daughters, he remained in debt to smugglers. The older daughter's husband never showed up to claim his bride. But Darya's husband, who already had another wife and eight children, wanted to take the young girl from Herat to Helmand. He spoke Pashto. She spoke Farsi.

But every time Haji Sufi came, Darya cursed her husband and ran away from him. Darya looked to me for support, knowing I had a different code of ethics and access to the outside world. One sizzling summer afternoon, I interviewed Sufi while Darya sat beside me. She grabbed my coat and trembled. "Please don't let him take me," she whispered in my ear.

That was the last time I saw her. She had come barefoot to my guide's house after I left that summer, asking that I return and free her from a forced marriage. I reported the case to the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, whose members did nothing. Afghan authorities told me she was one of thousands. They said that if she didn't go with her husband, her mother and five other siblings would suffer the consequences.

I wrote a story about her that was syndicated in several different countries, and readers sent money to her family. The following summer I delivered the money, but it was too late. Sufi had taken her to Helmand, and her mother asked me to go find her. She was afraid Darya would self-immolate, a tragic form of protest that's somewhat common among girls who share her fate. In 2005, I went undercover in a burqa, with my guide and a photo of her husband, to Sangine, Helmand, which was the frontline of war then. We knocked on doors and showed people his picture. Taliban sympathizers quickly figured out I had come from the West and threatened to imprison me, but my guide, who was from the area, talked them out of it.

I didn't find Darya.

I returned to the U.S. feeling guilty for allowing a child bride to be forced into slavery. Darya became the heroine in my book, Opium Nation. While writing the book, I searched for her from the U.S. by calling everyone she knew. Her mother Basira finally had a phone number in Marjah, Helmand, an area the U.S. had bombed and was now reconstructing with roads, phone lines, and schools. She had been there all along. Darya's uncle had given me the wrong district when I went looking for her. Marjah survived on poppy farming before the U.S. takeover, but now crops like cotton, corn, and nuts were being farmed. Darya lived in a closed compound with 20 of her in-laws. Her husband and his family grew poppies until the Americans seized the district.