“Sweetheart?” My mom puts her hand on my shoulder.

“I’m afraid to leave. I’m afraid Frank is going to be out there, and he’ll take me back to The Ranch, and I’ll never get out again.”

“That’s not going to happen, honey. I won’t let that happen, and neither will any of the people who love you.” She leads me away from the door and takes me to the kitchen, where she pours hot water over one of her homemade candies.

I stir the water, watching the candy dissolve at the bottom of the mug. “I want to be normal. I want everything to go back to the way it was before all the memories came back.”

“I’m so sorry, Char-char. If I could do it all over again I would make different choices. I would find a different way.”

“I know.”

I understand, sort of, why she chose the path she did. She put herself in control of her own life, she took the reins so no one else could, and she never stayed in one place so Frank couldn’t catch up with her.

I call Mr. Stroker and request to work from home this week. I only have a few client meetings, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to reschedule them. I also never ask to work from home, so he is more than accommodating—and concerned, of course.

I flounder for an excuse. Telling him I’ve suddenly developed acute agoraphobia as a result of being stalked by my not-real cult leader father sounds farfetched and could lead to more questions. So I tell him I had an allergic reaction to a new lotion, and it caused a full-body rash.

In the wake of the Daddy Frank episode, Darren has upped my security from the alarm system to a live bodyguard. So far he remains parked outside at night, and during the day he sits on my front step and makes sure the only people who come to my door are ones I want to see.

My mom leaves on Wednesday, very apropos, after my insistence that I’ll be fine on my own, especially now that I have a bodyguard and Violet’s been stopping by on a daily basis. I love my mom, but she gets antsy staying in one place for more than a few days at a time, and she’s driving me crazy. Besides, I’m not keen on rehashing all the memories from The Ranch or hearing again how sorry she is that Frank found us on account of her audition. It’s not like she could’ve known that Frank had finally jumped into the twenty-first century by getting a laptop and a Facebook account.

I don’t even feel like I know myself anymore, and trying to explain that is difficult. My mom thinks the answer is to get out of Chicago and travel with her. The idea of running certainly has it’s appeal, but then what would I have? I don’t want to leave behind all the people I care about, the family I created for myself in Violet and the girls, and even Darren.

I don’t know what to do about him, either. I’ve made such a mess of things.

He calls several times a day, but I can’t answer. I’m afraid to. I know what he was going to tell me. But I can’t decide if it was coming from a place of honesty, or if he was simply trying to give me a balm that would somehow soothe me, erase the pain and fear and uncertainty of everything that made me who I am. And I’m unsure who that even is anymore.

I want too much to let him love me.

But admitting it won’t prevent him from being traded. Loving him won’t stop him from moving halfway across the country. And if he goes, he takes half my heart with him.

He will regardless. So I don’t know why the words scare me so much.

Maybe because all the love I’ve known has been tied up in so much weirdness and instability. Maybe I think as soon as it’s real, it will fall apart. And if he stays, I have to acknowledge all the ways I’ve kept us in this constant state of stasis.

I spend all of Thursday watching terrible reality TV, trying to feel better about my shitstorm of a life. I don’t know how to unbreak myself enough to be able to love the way I want to. I mentally unpack my childhood at The Ranch, followed by the freak show that was my teenage years, until I stumbled upon Violet in my first year of college. And in doing so, I see all the pieces of myself and how they fit together in a jagged-edged puzzle of crazy.

I’m sheltered but not. I created normal where there wasn’t. I made a family so I wasn’t alone. And then I found Darren, the man who molded himself into what I needed, who changed as I required, who kept his emotions locked down to protect me from myself, who never once put the lid on my jar. In a lot of ways we were safe for each other, until it all came crashing down, as happens when emotions are given room to breathe and grow.