People Disappear. It happens all of the time.
When I was young, five or six, I remember seeing the faces.
“The Milk Carton Kids.”
Wasn’t that what we used to call them? Where the hell did they all go?
These days I suppose it’s a post on Facebook or Nextdoor. There rarely seems to be much urgency though. With the flick of a thumb, we scroll and bury them in an endless feed. We’re all too busy and not everyone is cut out to be a web sleuth.
I’m as guilty as the next person. Attention like time is ephemeral. We ignore so much, but the fact remains that the world is a murky, often unfathomable place, and that evil is often shrouded in layers of lies and deception. This is the inescapable truth.
Abduction. Trafficking of flesh and blood. Molestation. Organ harvesting. Murder. But if these unspeakable horrors don’t hit close to home or affect those we hold dear, do we even bother to give a damn? Flick. Scroll. Buried. Dismissed.
Once in a while, a case breaks through the noise and captures our undivided attention. We are consumed by it. If only for a moment. But for every case like that, there are countless others, tens of thousands each year all around the globe, unnoticed and forgotten. This account is not an exploration of the reasons why one crime or disappearance resonates while another fades away into oblivion. No. I’m not trying to make any kind of statement or pass judgment. I merely aim to highlight the uncomfortable truth that these events occur far more frequently than we’d care to accept or admit.
This is but one story. My own. And it’s true.
--
You never really know someone until they’re dead. At least that’s how it was with my father.
Dr. Gerald Blackwell. His legacy lives on in the generations of psychiatric professionals he taught and influenced. It was the first obituary I had ever written. It won’t be the last.
Wisconsin was cold. Its frigid grasp had taken hold, seeping into my bones and settling into my teeth. The porch, once a welcoming threshold, was now a half-frozen landing, covered in several storms worth of ice and snow. Neglected. No one had come or gone in some time.
I stood there. On uneven footing. The only sounds were that of my breath and the relentless gusts of the biting wind, whipping off the frozen lake. The door before me was a formidable sight - sturdy alder wood studded with jagged nails. It resembled something out of a medieval castle. This cabin, a lakeshore hideaway, was where I had spent nearly every summer of my youth. I had walked past the threshold countless times before, and yet, there was nothing routine about the thought of crossing it this time.
As I drew a breath, the acrid odor of gunmetal polish and sweat from my palm filled my gut. My hands began to tingle followed by a vexing itch. It was the blood rising to the surface of my skin.
Then, the shaking started. God damned nerves.
And there I was, revolver in hand. Poised to be the instrument of vengeance. A mere door between me and justice. All that was left was to open it and step into violence.
--
Jerry died a month ago to the day. It had been overwhelming just how many things he left behind. He wasn’t a hoarder. Nevertheless, it was still a lot.
There were keepsakes. Tucked inside a sun-scorched 19th-century armoire where I used to hide all my old baseball cards. Reminders. Quotes. Scattered notes. Slotted between the curled yellowing pages of the fourth edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. There were candy wrappers. Those crinkly black ones. Chocolate ganache truffles. I stepped on one that first week. It’s no wonder the old man had diabetes. There were photographs. Filed away in old shoe boxes. Inside a hallway closet. Stacked alongside similar boxes. A metropolis of forgotten memories.
Here I was. His only son, a glorified custodian. It’s the people left behind that have to pick up all of the pieces. And it’s those thousands of pieces, long discarded, whether intentionally or not, that come together to complete the portrait of the departed.
Who was he?
I think it was a Saturday when I found out. November. The oak trees had only just begun shedding their leaves. I had the day off from the art institute, where I worked as a conservator, restoring old masters.
Day after day, a single light held my gaze through a pair of loupes. With a steady hand and swab, I worked a millimeter at a time. Mimicry and patience. That was the job.
It was rare for me to have a day off. You see, like my father, I was one of those people uncomfortable when idle. Colleagues of mine were always cracking jokes at my expense, “A little vitamin D would do you good, Sebastian.” They’d tell me that I was pale. I was. Always have been. They’d ask me why I was so quiet or why I didn’t want to join them for drinks after work. Eventually, they stopped asking. Growing up, I was homeschooled until I wasn’t. I preferred to stay inside. It was easier inside. Jerry used to say that often. I suppose it rubbed off on me. I wasn’t agoraphobic or anything. I just felt safe there. No one to bother me. It wasn’t that I lacked social skills; I simply preferred to be alone, reading about history and the provenance of things. That was more interesting to me than athletics and the rigor of my peers. And that’s why I didn’t care what anyone else said or thought. If you love your work, then days off and vacations seem like frivolous indulgences.
My dog, Jackson, was by my side as he usually was. I had been throwing him the ball when the camera alert from the front door buzzed my leg. He began barking almost immediately at the approaching sedan snaking its way up the cobbled driveway.
A man and a woman exited the vehicle. Detectives. His cheap necktie and her wavy red hair whipped in the wind as the crush of dead oak leaves crackled with each of their approaching steps. My eyes fixed on his pockmarked bulbous nose. Everything was still. Everything but my heart banging against my chest wall like an invading army at the barricaded gates.
Jackson lunged forward. I throttled his choke collar with a firm grasp.
“Easy, boy. Easy.”
“Shepherd?” The stocky Irish detective asked.
“Malinois.”
“Beautiful,” he said with such sincerity. He extended an open palm, “May I?”
“Of course,” I nodded. It was clear the man knew how to handle the animal. Jackson leaned into him. Good boy. My lips pursed, pleased with his training, which took much longer than I expected but was well worth the time and investment.
Before I could get the next word out, his counterpart, Detective Red, cut right through the small talk–
“Are you Sebastian Blackwell?”
“Most people call me Seb.”
“Dr. Gerald Blackwell is your father.”
“Yes. Jerry. No one calls him Gerald. Is he okay?” I asked, knowing full well that their presence meant that everything was not okay. Even still, I wasn’t ready for what came next. No one ever is.
Her voice turned a solemn tone to deliver the blow, “There is no easy way to say this. I’m sorry. He’s gone.”
My legs were rooted to the ground. Red’s words were a battle ax. As I dropped, Irish reached for my elbow, trying to support my fall. I slipped right through his grasp, and all I could hear was my own choked denial. Echoing. No, no, no. I repeated, over and over, to a symphony of chittering insects in the long grass and dried-up leaves.
--
The Rush University Medical Center Hospital, an architectural landmark, rises two hundred and fifty-two feet into the sky. How did I know that number? Perhaps it was published when the building was up for public review or I had looked it up between drug-induced sleep cycles on my phone. Couldn’t be sure.
A week had come and gone.
Red and Irish hadn’t followed up on the seemingly “routine” set of questions they had asked after I recovered from my episode. It was all a minor matter anyway as far as they were concerned. Suicide was the cause of death. But that was like telling me one plus one equaled pi. My father did not believe in suicide. This was a man who had dedicated his entire life to fighting that exact impulse. A true believer. One of God’s archangels at the front line in the war against diseases of the mind. When I struggled with my own mental health as an adolescent, he often said, “Life is precious.” I could hear his voice in my ears even now, “No matter how bad it is, you have something to live for, Seb.”
He was right. It couldn’t have been suicide. And so my mind raced, carefully poring over what was left of his life, a millimeter at a time, considering all the possibilities into the murder of a man that I called my father.
--
Grief had never been at the forefront of my mind. The feeling was foreign. I’d never lost anyone before. Had I lost him? Or was he simply gone? Absent. I tried to recollect the last time we saw one another. Had I said goodbye? I couldn’t recall.
A friend from work, who had recently lost her mother, told me that she went to a medium. She found comfort in hearing that her mother’s energy never truly left this plane. I nodded along and made sure to genuinely thank her for the attempt at reassurance. But the truth was, I didn’t subscribe to such mysticism.
She was one of many people that visited. There were colleagues, students, old friends, and acquaintances. Each offered condolences and a similar “Jerry story” that somehow encapsulated the life of the man. Some brought food or flowers. A woman with stringy grey and black hair took hold of my hand. She couldn’t so much as look me in the eye when she told me she was sorry. I think they went to high school together, but I couldn’t be sure. So many names. So many stories. They all had questions. How could none of us see it coming?
We all have secrets. We all have pain. Some disguise it better than others. My father was good at such deceit. Compartmentalizing. That can only last for so long, though. Eventually, the sickness seeps out. We become our dark thoughts.
My Aunt Cara and Uncle Peter drove down from Minneapolis. They were both M.D.s and had a similar specialty practice as my father. Family business, I suppose. Certainly helps to have a prescribing doctor on hand when an unexpected death in the family and a panic attack hits. An orderly diet of desipramine and diazepam eased the nerves.
Some of my earliest memories were weekends at Cara and Peter’s lake house. We were always close. Maybe that was because I never knew my mother. She left soon after I was born. There was no plan for me. No one talked about her much. I gathered from a young age that it was a touchy subject. In fact, whenever I brought up the topic, they quickly deflected. All those years and mileage between my road and hers were a mystery and one that they preferred to forget. I was the seed left behind and my father and his extended family nurtured me.
Peter once told me I had my mother’s eyes and though we rarely spoke her name, I always sensed some hesitancy, something unsaid, whenever we walked the shore’s edge up at the lake. There was regret in his voice. The kind of regret that only festers with time. Back then, we’d spend hours searching for the flattest smoothest stones, and then after we had gathered enough, we lined them up and skipped them as far as we could across the placid water. We did this until our arms were sore.
“Dr. Gerald Blackwell is your father.”
I watched the red-haired detective’s lips move. Her inflection somewhere between an inquiry and a statement. Dr. Gerald Blackwell. Jerry. The stern, melancholy man who had raised me. He had never remarried or pursued any romantic endeavors, instead, his devotion was to me. Always maintaining a sharp, watchful gaze, like a peregrine, never straying from its target. At night, he cried. Tormented by some pain. The sound passed through my heavy door like nothing.
Despite his grief, he never wavered in front of me. He kept me safe. Held me in his arms after I broke my leg, and the ER doctor had to reset my shattered bones.
Jerry was kind. A lifelong learner, with a thirst for knowledge, and a yearning to understand the intricacies of the human condition.
Only the shadows are the truth.
--
Cara had warned me that grief manifests in a variety of ways. It can come without warning, like a swell of waves crashing, holding you under the surface.
She stood in the door frame to his office.
“Dr. Sorensen is arranging to pick up his patient files.”
The patient files. I nearly forgot. Jerry had been working from home up until recently. He was writing another book. Most of his clinical research and files were locked away in the office cabinets. I often wondered what happened to all those secrets patients spill in a session. Do they die with the doctor, or are they passed on to a new guardian for safekeeping? Whether it be a pilot or a line cook, the faith we put in strangers has always been unnerving to me.
As Cara reflected on her own shock, my eyes raked across the desk, sticking to a set of keys in the hand-carved antique onyx ashtray.
“We had lunch a few weeks ago,” she said as tears filled her eyes.
We embraced.
“I’m sorry.”
We all were.
--
That night I sat in my father’s office. Jackson curled up at my feet. My father often watched after him when I was called away on a project or needed someone to look after him on short notice. He loved Jackson and the dog’s familiarity with this space was evident. When he stretched, his paws and nails scratched up against the exact scuffed spot of the desk. The marking was clear. I remember my father had told me that the door accidentally closed behind him once when he took a phone call into the kitchen to refill his tea. Within two minutes, Jackson, only a puppy back then, tried to chew through the drywall. His snout was covered in white dust. He didn’t like being left behind. Who does?
I had been staying in my old room since he passed. Why spend money on a hotel? This was my home. Part of me wanted to keep an eye on things. I’ve heard stories of thieves combing the obituaries looking to steal from vulnerable mourners. Breaking locks. Pillaging a house that has already lost everything. That wasn’t happening to us.
His office had become my refuge. I had never been allowed in there while he was alive; therefore, I felt my presence was an act of defiance. A rite of passage. Fuck it. I was the one left to pick up the pieces.
The stained glass window overlooking the unkempt courtyard became a reflecting point of my sorrow and suspicious thoughts. As I gazed out, I couldn’t help but think of this one time I stood at the observation deck atop a downtown skyscraper. I watched a spider dance in its web - perilously hanging between the buttressed steel girders - a thousand feet up. The memory abruptly triggered a dark thought in my mind. Or was it the thought that triggered the memory? I imagined my father. Falling. One hundred and twenty-five feet per second. Ninety miles per hour compounding into impact.
I couldn’t help the way my mind worked. Sleep had been difficult. Especially since I stopped taking the drugs. Better to face the discomfort and misery than to numb it out.
There was a gun in the top drawer. A Ruger, 44 special, with a walnut handle. I had stolen it once as a kid. I couldn’t tell you why I did or even why my father had the weapon, but he did, and it was still there, clean as the day he purchased it. Not tucked away or hidden in some safe. But right there in the top drawer. Ready.
It’s a dark thought. A suspicion. A feeling.
Was he waiting for someone? Had that day finally come?
I bit my tongue because giving voice to such a suspicion can rip reality apart. Intuition is a poison and burrows into the brain with ease. Mania charts new courses. Up is down and down is up and the routine is obliterated. You’re racing. Shaking. Feeding obsession. We don’t want that. Control, Seb. Control is key. Certainty is comfort. Certainty is safety. But the seed is already sowed.
I picked up the keys from the marble ashtray. As I squeezed them, I could feel the rigid teeth biting against my skin. Penance for my future sins. The key slid into the tumbler bolt of the cabinet. I held it there a moment. Last chance to reverse course. Turning the key over was a criminal act. There was a feeling in my gut that answers lie inside. It was an irritation. An itch. If I didn’t scratch it until it bled truth, then I very well might lose my mind too. I couldn’t help myself. My intrusion was undoubtedly wrong and yet the fact that these files were in the home in the first place seemed unethical.
I gnawed at the dry skin around my fingernails as I spread out the first set of files.
Patients ranged in age and gender. There was a veteran struggling with post-traumatic stress. There were victims of violent crime, and sexual abuse - trying to cope - to rebuild their lives. There were anxiety disorders, gender dysphoria, excoriation, somatic tinnitus. There was inadequacy. There was pain. Trauma. Madness. Addiction. Even my own burgeoning fixation as I hunched over the desk, flipping pages and peeling at my skin. What wasn’t there was a motive. At least not one I could find.
These were not violent criminals. They were everyday people. Struggling. Hoping someone might ease their burden. Make life tolerable. My eyes fell. No answers lie within these files, so I opened the drawers, tucked them back inside, and turned the key with the hope that someone else might pick up the baton and be that new guardian.
Jackson stretched out and pawed at the wood again. This time he whimpered. He was either hungry or anxious. There was no in-between. I reached down and stroked his soft mane. As I did, my eye was drawn to the scratches against the desk. I noticed a strange notch in the wood where the drawer met the frame. There was a thin channeled groove dead-ended with an indentation the size of a post stamp.
I took the letter opener off the desk and guided it to the impression. With a firm crick of the wrist, the wood separated, revealing a small opening.
Tucked neatly inside was a notebook. I extended my chewed-up pointer and thumb and latched on to the cover like a claw game in a kid’s arcade. I held on tight as I carefully extracted the prize from its sanctuary.
It was an old bound composition notebook. The black spine and covers were well-worn and scratched, no doubt the result of repeating the painstaking concealment process so many times. There was nothing on the covers or bind that might give away the identity of an owner or subject. For all I knew, this could have been a secret novel or heirloom left behind by the previous owner of the desk. I had read about such remarkable discoveries, where an unwitting descendent uncovers an invaluable missing painting or objet d’art. It only took a flip of the cover for me to discover that this was not that.
On that first page, etched in fine black ink, was the following inscription:
Patient 100147
A standard clinical form exactly like the others had been folded and tucked neatly between the front cover and the first page. I carefully unfolded it. Most of the fillable sections had been blacked out. First with a manic pen and then with a crude permanent marker. Redacted with purpose. Concealed by fear. Patient 100147 had been stripped of a name. There were no anthropometric measurements or any other identifying data set typical of the other patient forms. Only a number.
As my thumb dragged across the form page and into the lined journal, I paused to consider the sheer trepidation that came over me. It was a feeling unlike any I had ever had. And despite it, there was no path but the one ahead. A quick whip fan of the pages not only revealed the dense review ahead but called to me like a Siren off the shores of Sirenuse. Might I face a similar fate as those poor mariners that answered their song?
“By God- stop this, Sebastian. Let suspicion and the dead rest. For doubt, even if it unearths the truth, is a path toward misery and destruction.”
What makes an individual do a thing that they know they shouldn’t?
Jerry was diligent. A man of habit. The files I had previously intruded on were neat. Boxes ticked. History recorded. Symptoms diagnosed. Prescribed. Cross-referenced for research. Collected and filed away. By the book. The notebook was the opposite in every way.
The first session was nearly three years ago.
Date of Exam: 4/10/2018
The patient, aged 42, notes that she had suffered years of depression onset by a traumatic event(s) - repeated sexual assault when she was a teenager. Intermittent issues with an eating disorder (anorexia). She is apprehensive. Unable to keep eye contact/focus. Indicates this is a persistent issue. Tremor of the right hand and foot. Possible withdrawal symptoms? Denial of drug use aside from Rx. Requested detailed history. She was reluctant. “Not ready.” Needs reassurance. Comfort. Repeatedly asked about my background and medical history. Scheduled f/u.
Date of Exam: 4/19/2018
The patient appears on edge. Sweating. Often avoiding or changing the subject when questioned directly. Rarely makes eye contact. When she does, she becomes panicked, almost frightened.
Starting to break down the barrier. Revealed some history. Grew up in rural Indiana. Various sleep disorders. Recurring night terrors. Not comfortable discussing that quite yet. The patient states that she has been in/out of mental health facilities for twenty-plus years.
Desperately wants help. “Relief,” she called it.
Date of Exam: 5/08/2018
The patient apologized for missing the previous two week’s sessions. Admits to being disorganized. Losing her phone. “Not good at this sort of stuff.” Explain the value of time and commitment to treatment.
She reveals more history. Discusses first psychiatric treatments. The patient was evaluated at age fourteen. She talks about her sexually abusive father. Describes his late-night drunken intrusions. Distrust of family. “She (mom) pretended to sleep as he had his way with me.” One night she stole his gun and kept it hidden under the covers. “I had enough.”
An article from a small-town Indiana publication was folded and tucked into the next page. The headline read: Beecher Deputy Accidentally Shot Dead in Own Home.
The police put her on a psychiatric hold. She spent nearly a month in a facility. A victim victimized. “After all, they were all friends with him.” She was isolated. Walled off from the community. Friends and family. Didn’t sleep. Haunted by footsteps on the rotted wood planks. Fear of her father. Multimodal triggers. Recalls the stink of Old Forester and Reds on his breath. “A waking nightmare.” Amplified by isolation.
Prescribed anti-anxiety. Mood charting.
*Consider antipsychotics
Deep into the night, as I peeled the pages of treatment, I could sense a growing rapport between my father and Patient 100147. It was clear that this was no arms-length case. It never was. Two years into their discourse, paranoid afterthoughts began to appear in the margins. I suspect they had been fueled by late-night Plymouth gin. A half-empty bottle, another remnant, sat perched on the window sill. I walked over. Took a smell. Juniper and bergamot. Not my poison. Not that it ever mattered.
I swigged the bottle and cringed. I imagined Jerry’s pen scratching the page, spewing jumbled thoughts that reeked of truth and leaped off the page like live wires.
Then, suddenly, there it was, at the bottom of the fifty-sixth session, a stark line dragged underneath it, drawing the text to my heavy eyes:
I was beginning to suspect that she knew. And that all of this was an intricate endgame playing out one session, one secret at a time.
Knew what? What were you hiding?
I kept at it. Drinking and reading and pacing the room I was barred from for so many years, an unhealthy collection of thoughts began connecting in my head.
What were you hiding?
--
There were loose-leaf pages; journaling exercises stapled into the pages of the notebook. Patient 100147 spoke of moving away. Settling near Midland, Michigan. I gave her a voice. It was soft and welcoming like a sedative.
“Beautiful country. Quiet. With lakes and the tallest grass I’d ever seen. Far from the racket of the city. It was peaceful.”
She met a man named John. They fell in love. Married. Soon after that, she was pregnant. A child was never a part of the plan.
“When it comes to love, more often than not, life just happens, and we adjust accordingly, setting aside the pain of the past, hoping it remains forgotten.”
The pregnancy was difficult. High-risk. Preeclampsia. The doctor advised bed rest. She did as she was told. She didn’t mind. The anxiety of uncertainty was the worst symptom. I understood that.
One night, John returned home. Drunk. Distraught. He had lost his job. He wasn’t the only one. He searched for another, but no one was hiring. She told him they would make it work. For the sake of the child, she begged him to hold out hope. He tried, or at least she lied to herself and believed that he did.
Life changed. He stayed out. Days. Nights. She was alone in the house. She didn’t press him. She had to stay calm. To create a nest for their unborn child. That was all that mattered.
When a day turned into a week, and a week turned into two, she cried until the sun came up.
She could no longer afford to be on bed rest. Her neighbor, who cleaned houses, offered to bring her along. A few shifts a week. The word “choice” ceased to exist for the desperate, a group of which she now considered herself a member. For the desperate, survival was the only choice.
One day there was a sharp pain deep in her side.
She remembered her mother’s labored breathing when she was pregnant with her baby sister. She timed her breath to the memory. It was her only point of reference.
Slow, deep into her belly. In and out. And in. And out.
She hadn’t thought about her sister in years. She had died of lymphoma at a young age. The memory of her was as cutting as the one in her side. She thought about her mother. She wondered if thoughts could travel. If loved ones and blood were somehow connected by some unseen force, and if they were, did she and her mother share the same thought, a world away?
Once the pain subsided, she abandoned such fanciful delusions. She was better off alone.
The bottle was nearly empty now. I pulled the drapes shut, blacking out the dawn. I wasn’t ready for this night of discovery. I wasn’t prepared to put that voice to sleep.
Her story and mine went on. The pregnancy had been difficult, but the delivery was effortless. The boy came out and into her arms, and for the first time in her life, she was at peace.
She was not alone. She never would be again. She felt whole for a single day, and then she passed out.
There was blood. Hemorrhaging. A pool of red. A pierced heart. She drifted between worlds for what felt like an eternity. When she finally awakened, a woman with braided black hair held her arm and hand. She was a counselor. A doctor stood at her side. He couldn’t look her in the eye. The woman clung to her as he delivered the shock.
“He had passed in the night. Complications, the doctor said. A sudden cardiac event. There was nothing that could be done.”
The counselor held her against her chest as she screamed out. Nurses covered their ears. She demanded to see the child. She insisted that someone bring him to her so that she could hold him one last time and say goodbye. No one ever granted that wish.
So, she went home. Alone. Shattered. There was a burial. A small casket. Earth was moved. And the baby laid to rest. It all happened so quickly. She was numb.
John never came back. She had spoken with his cousin and learned he had found work outside Cleveland. There was another woman.
She neatly laid out a vanity cabinet full of pills. They were the colors of the rainbow. She swallowed them one at a time and sank into her love seat. The calm before the last sleep. A soap opera called Another World played on the television as her eyes closed.
A neighbor, an honorably discharged military field nurse, who had run into her the previous week, and knew of her circumstance, happened to hear the loud television echoing in the hallway. He knocked on her door. Concerned, he broke down her door and found her there.
This time something was done.
--
The estate attorney called all of the items left behind, the debris. At first, I wondered why. I didn’t like the connotation. Now it made sense. What else would you call this mess? These remnants of destruction.
When I was a kid, I had all kinds of workbooks and coloring books. I’m sure that is how I first fell in love with art. I was always meticulous about staying in the lines. Jerry used to photocopy the same pages because I insisted on starting over if I veered even the slightest bit outside the set parameters.
It was the same with connecting dots. Even though I knew the final design, I was particular and always followed the numbers. A millimeter at a time. Clean.
This was like that. All of these things. A lifetime of lies. Dots on a page. As I began to connect them, each one illuminated another. Then, another. Until everything was clear, like the lake before the skipping stone.
I was not Dr. Gerald Blackwell’s son. No. I was buried in a small coffin outside Midland, Michigan. My name was chiseled on a headstone. Son to a mother without name.
Patient 100147. Like me, she lost everything. I belonged to her then and I belong to her still.
Where was she? My mother. Was she the one that held my hand in that living room, who couldn’t look me in the eye and told me she was sorry? Why? She had nothing to apologize for.
She never stopped looking. They told her to, “Move on with your life.” She refused. After the coffin was lowered into the earth. After all of the prayers had been said and all of the friends stopped coming around. She persisted.
A million questions filled my head. I would tear this house apart until I answered every single one. I opened the first box of photographs. There I was, a baby. Surrounded by family. Fiends!
Jerry. Aunt Cara. Uncle Peter. The others. Visiting on holidays. Coming and going. Watching me in nearly every photograph. A rat in their puzzle. Subject. Experiment.
Were there others like me? Yes.
Abducted as babies. Yes.
Sheltered by strangers. Yes.
Studied. Yes.
For what purpose? To what end?
“No matter how bad it is, you have something to live for, Seb.”
Jerry was right.
The answers were coming. I was coming. For all of them. One door at a time. His gun in my hand. The one meant for my mother or the other forgotten ones who slipped through the cracks.