Chapter 1. The Nightmare Begins - the story of a groomed runaway.

We didn’t know if it was a cult, my husband and I, but we were certain of coercion. As our 18 year old daughter became a runaway, she left with a 32 year old man - nearly twice our baby’s age, with the help of two persuasive young ladies, one just 19 and the other just 21, according to our daughter Abby. These are what we later learned were 'flying monkeys'.

This moment unfolded through a dizzying sequence of events before she ran away. So much like a sudden storm, with lightning strikes and great claps of thunder all around us, from random and unexpected directions, that we had to sit in the puddly aftermath and string the events together using the paper calendar hanging in my home office, marked up with cheerful colored sharpies, and our mottled memories of recent times.

The calendar, and my husband Bill’s memory, which is far better than mine, were a godsend. The Nature Conservancy sends me a calendar every year, and I mark everything on it, from yoga classes to Abby’s recent high school graduation (which ended up being helpful for our private detective). I have never been a journaler – that would have been even more helpful, but happyish families don’t usually think to start writing everything down in case this sort of thing happens, do they? Also, I don’t find my life to be fascinating enough to write about. I would bore myself to death, lately.

But I digress. Now and then I need to go completely off topic so that I stop bursting into tears.

Every day for the first year when I awoke I’d say to Bill, “another day in hell.” And he’d says to me, “Fuck my life. And fuck yours too.” And then he would hug me in his big bear arms and tell me how much he loved me. I wished we could tell Abby that, but she was missing.

If I was on my phone too much before all this happened, now I was a slave to it. I heard phantom ringtones and text chimes, so I kept it with me wherever I was in the house. And I was home most of the time, as I was laid off from my job recently. I really didn’t like that job, and I needed to move on from the field I had become stuck in over too many years, so this was going to be a great summer, I told myself. I’ll start fresh. I’ll be able to spend more time with Abby before she leaves for college at the end of August. We are going to have a wonderful time, my bestie and I (we all called each other bestie and often referred to ourselves as “the Gilmore Girls”).

But on June 26, 2023, My dreams turned into nightmares as my only child obeyed her predator, and left all of her family and all of her friends to follow this dreadful hypnotist - even forsaking her admission to her number one choice college - to live with him over 200 miles away.

NEXT POST: THE EXTRACTION, a timeline...

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