Bernice Hastings has survived everything life has thrown at her - a violent childhood, the foster care system, and years of scraping by on the margins of Toronto's west end - guided by the one constant she has always trusted: the voice in her head that has been with her since she was ten years old.
When she spots a woman she is convinced is the only teacher who ever showed her kindness, Bernice does the only thing that makes sense to her. She takes her.
But the woman is not who Bernice thinks she is. Rosalind Sims is a social worker, a wife, a daughter - and now a captive in a basement room, wearing a dog collar around her neck, fighting to stay alive long enough to find a way out.
Told across eleven days, What No One Knew moves between the desperate world of the basement and the frantic search unfolding above it - through the eyes of a woman trying to survive, a man terrified of losing his wife, and a damaged, fiercely loving woman who believes she is doing the only thing she can to protect the two children who need her most.
Tender, brutal, and utterly compelling, this is a novel about the people who fall through every crack - and what it costs, for everyone, when no one catches them in time.