Rhodes was Natalie’s last name. She always felt like an older sister to me, the only person I could trust as a kid. Using her last name makes it feel like she is still here in some small way. It makes it feel like I carried something of her forward instead of letting everything she was disappear.
I still intend to give Brooke the ring. I still intend to stand in front of people who know our real names and promise her something that isn’t built on forged documents and contingency plans. I still intend to give her a wedding that doesn’t require aliases.
For now, the paperwork will do.
We have a new house. Two stories tucked deep in the forest, fog rolling across the ground most mornings. We're still in Washington where the roads narrow and strangers rarely pass through.
The kids have new identities too. Travis built them from scratch. Immunization records, transcripts, a paper trail that stretches back years. He enrolled them in a private school that doesn’t ask many questions and doesn’t keep staff who enjoy digging through families’ histories.
Travis is back on his feet as well. He moves without the limp now. He spends most nights hunched over his laptop, breaking through encrypted networks and siphoning money.
The Collective database ended up being more useful than they ever intended.
Travis drained millions out of the Grant family accounts. Elliot’s money, Grant’s money, the family trusts, the shell corporations that funded their operations. He pulled it out piece by piece and routed it through offshore accounts before anyone realized what was happening.
Combined with what I took from Victor Voss’s account, we had enough to keep all of us afloat for a very long time.
Poetic, in a twisted way.
The same system they used to control people is the system that ended up paying for our freedom.
We’re comfortable now, safe and bored sometimes. But that’s what survival is. It’s not exciting. It’s not some high-adrenaline chase. It’s quiet. It’s homework and dinner before bed and grocery runs in sunglasses. Burner phones, quiet alarms and daily routines.
Brooke has been going to therapy every week. She says it helps. I believe her. She laughs more now. The nightmares still come, but the weight that used to sit on her chest all the time is finally starting to loosen.
And now I’ve started therapy.
Brooke said I should try it. She said if I don’t at least try, I’m never going to know if it could truly help with the bullshit that lives inside me.
So now here I am. Sitting in our home office, camera off, mic on. Laptop balanced on the edge of my desk. The therapist's voice playing in my ears.
The name on her screen says Dr. Morales.
“Good afternoon, Devin,” she greets. “How has this week been?”
“Quiet.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Good.”
I lean back in my chair.
“So where we left off at the end of the last session,” she begins. “You described yourself as someone who survived a lot of fucked up shit. I want to understand the parts of you that don’t feel much. The parts you have called wrong.”
I shift slightly in the chair and watch the black square where my camera would be.
“My childhood wasn’t complicated,” I shift my attention from the floor to her face on the screen. “It was violent.”
She waits.
“My father believed abuse was the same thing as discipline. If something went wrong in the house, he decided someone needed to bleed for it.”
Her pen starts moving.
“He kept everything quiet. No screaming. No neighbors calling the police. Just rules. You followed them or you didn’t.”
“And if you didn’t?”
