Leo

LEO

NOW

The cops brought you back to our place just long enough to pack up your stuff. The rest of us wait downstairs while you go up alone.

We’re all guilty of assuming you’re pretty much helpless. We’ve forgotten you’re the same girl who survived eleven years in some hellhole, who crafted your own shank to stab a man with and set yourself free. Not many people could do that. You’re stronger than we think. You’re stronger than you think.

This is what the cops came up with at the police station: there’s something called false memories. They feel real like real memories, but they’re not. People’s minds can deceive them, or they can be tricked into remembering things that never happened in the first place. Memory can be manipulated. Ideas can be implanted inside a person’s head. That’s what they think happened to you.

As the cops continued to pry, you remembered being read to from a newspaper, seeing Dad’s and Mom’s pictures in that paper before your world went dark. The cops dug up an old article from the paper online and Dad’s picture was exactly as you described it: Dad standing in front of our blue house. There was another picture inset into the text. This was one of Mom. The caption: Suburban mom found dead of apparent suicide. The article had been added to the AP newswire, which meant it ran in papers almost everywhere.

For whatever reason, Eddie and Martha found the article. They made you believe you were Delilah, and that the people in the pictures were your dad and mom. There’s no saying why, not unless the cops find them. But the man cop guesses that Eddie and Martha were obsessed with Delilah’s high profile case, or they were copycat criminals. They got off on taking you. They either pretended or believed that you were that elusive missing girl who captured the attention of the world and quickly earned celebrity status: my sister.

It’s taking a long time for you to pack up your things. But no one wants to rush you because you’re going through a lot of heavy stuff right now. You need a minute alone. We sit in the kitchen and wait. Dad gets everyone water.

The good news is that your DNA is a real match to some missing kid in the database. Your name is Carly Byrd and you’re sixteen years old. You disappeared about a week after my sister did, from some place near St. Louis. You got snatched off your own street. There’s no saying why someone deemed my sister’s story newsworthy and yours not.

After about a half hour of waiting for you, Dad goes to see if you need help.

Almost immediately, he starts hollering from the top of the stairs. “She’s gone. She’s gone!”

I take the steps two at a time to find that the room is empty and the clothes Dad bought for you still in their drawers. You’ve run away. The window is open. My sister’s bedroom is on the second floor, but there’s a roof and a trellis just outside. Desperate times call for desperate measures. And you’re desperate.