The Lets Read Podcast - 350: MY UNCLE HAD AN EVIL TWIN | 7 TERRIFYING True Scary Stories / Rain Ambience | EP 336

Episode Date: June 16, 2026

This episode includes narrations of true creepy encounters submitted by normal folks just like yourself. Today you'll experience horrifying stories about Toxic Relationships & Dark Family Secrets.HAVE A STORY TO SUBMIT?[e-mail] ME ON -►YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/c/letsreadofficial► Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/letsread.official/♫ Music & Cover art: INEKThttps://www.youtube.com/@inektToday's episode is sponsored by:- Betterhelp

It feels like a long time ago now, I went to stay with some relatives over the holidays. Late on Christmas Day, the party was winding down, and I was sitting with my uncle and a few others while we finished off a bottle or two. My aunt and uncle decorated their kitchen almost entirely with pictures of themselves and my cousins, so we spent quite a while looking at each of them and either reminiscing or harmlessly poking fun. I remember we were laughing at one picture because my uncle's 70s hair was absolutely. absolutely hilarious. Then as he took it all in good humor, he got up and said something like, if you think that's funny, wait until you see Aunt Janney's hair from the 80s. She thought she was Grace Jones. Now we're thinking no way. And my aunt tells him that he's a dead man if he brings

those photo albums down from their bedroom. But my uncle didn't listen and somehow he lived to see another day. Aunt Janie's hair was cool as heck, by the way. And then since my uncle brought down a whole box full of photo albums for us to flick through, we started passing them around. I found myself flicking through this one album that contained much older photos than the others. And then in one photo, a man I first mistook for my Uncle Steve, whose home I was staying at, was standing in a church while wearing some kind of ceremonial Catholic robe. Now, don't laugh at me. I don't know the names of those things. But admittedly, I was pretty drunk, so the first thing out of my mouth was like, Holy crap, Uncle Steve.

When the heck were you a priest? Now, he was pretty drunk, too, so for a second he says, I've never been... And then he shot me this look like he'd just done something he shouldn't. Then, and he wasn't mean or aggressive about it, but he quickly took the album away, saying, I think we've seen enough from this one. Now, I'm wondering why he's all embarrassed about it. But when Aunt Janie realized what was happening, she immediately rose from her seat, took the album and returned it upstairs.

And when she returned, I asked her what the deal was and why she seemed so desperate to remove that particular album. She said that she didn't want to spoil the evening, so she'd tell me all about it in the morning. In the next morning, after a very hungover breakfast, I waited for an opportune moment to ask my aunt Janie about the photo I saw. She sighed and said something like, I've been hoping you've forgotten all about that.

But she stayed true to her word, put on a pot of it, coffee and started telling me the story. And so the first thing you need to know is that the man in the religious clothing was not my Uncle Steve. It was his non-identical twin, Simon. They still looked hella similar, but had apparently taken very different paths in life because Simon went off to join the seminary or whatever after college. Now, I thought it was odd that I was only just getting an introduction to him, but over the course of the next half hour or so, it made total sense why no one talked about him anymore. After graduating from the seminary, now don't crucify me, by the way, I don't know how it all works, my uncle Simon ended up moving to Nebraska. He worked here on the

East Coast for a while, but then was offered some big shot job working for the church way over in Lincoln, and so that's where he went. He stayed in Lincoln for around 10 years, and then one day he forwarded Uncle Steve a new address and a phone number. Steve thinks he's been promoted or something, and so he calls to congratulate him. But Uncle Simon hadn't been promoted. He'd retired from the church, yet he wasn't some senior. He was in his mid-30s. Uncle Steve thought that Simon sounded weird on the phone,

so he drove all the way out to see him at his new place to make sure that it was okay. Well, Uncle Simon was not okay. He was drinking a whole bunch and said that he'd lost his faith and had basically given up on the world. Uncle Steve figured that he was having some kind of early onset, at midlife crisis and stayed with him until he got his drinking under control. And then once he was on his feet again, Steve drove home and monitored his brother by phone instead. He called him one day, and then once every couple of days and then once a week.

And by the time the calls were a week, Simon was saying something about writing a book and trying to get it published. He had a bunch of savings from his work with the church, and since he was acting stable, Uncle Steve figured that Simon was over the worst of his midlife crisis. They kept in touch, just not in the regular, but then one day, Uncle Steve called his brother and found that he wasn't answering his phone. He got so worried that he drove out to Nebraska to check on him personally. But when he arrived, he found Simon had passed away in his sleep. Uncle Steve later said that finding his brother's body like that was the worst thing that ever happened to him.

But since he was so focused on reporting the death to the cops and not compromising on what might have been a crime scene, and he didn't take a detailed look around Simon's house, meaning he and his family had to wait about a week or two to get a full picture of what caused his death. And so the first thing that Uncle Steve found out was that Simon died from some kind of liver disease caused by his drinking. He'd apparently started up again in secret and it all just caught up with him one day in the worst possible way.

And then once they were clear to collect his belongings, Steve found out why his brother had started drinking again and that it's all to do with that book that he was writing. Now, this was back in the early 90s, so Simon had one of those electronic word processors to write with. Well, Steve ends up taking it home and asks it to print out what's stored on it, and it prints out everything Simon had written over the past couple of weeks. It turns out Simon's book was about his time in the church, but it read like a damned confession.

Basically, the big, high-profile job that he'd been given in Lincoln was essentially a public, relations role, in that his job was to maintain good relations between the Catholic Church and the people of Nebraska. But this was a PR role unlike any other, because the specifics involved visiting the families of children who had been abused by priests or whoever, and convincing them not to take any legal action. And he did this by telling them the offending priests would be moved, and also by offering them pretty measly amounts of cash, considering these kids would be scarred for life, obviously.

If they didn't comply, he'd move on to threatening them with countersuits and whatnot, saying that it'd be much easier and much less costly for them to just move on. Now, you might think that that kind of thing only happens maybe once every few years or so, or if you're naive to the Catholic Church, that is. But for those that aren't, well, I'm guessing you're already wise to the fact that there were a lot of these cases for Uncle Simon to deal with. There was a time when he had one family a week, sometimes two, if the schedule got a little congested, and he wasn't just confined in Nebraska either.

He traveled to all the surrounding states, using either the carrot or the stick to convince these poor victimized families to take the money and shut up for the good of the church. And the way they justified this, the church, I mean, was absolutely nightmarish. First off, there was a running narrative among certain priests that the kids were responsible for tempting the clergy, and that the encounters in certain cases were very much consensual. Now, I can't even begin to wrap my head around the disgustingly perverted logic of that, and how someone could convince themselves that that was the case, but I can kind of understand the next group,

who thought certain parents were just trying to get money out of the church. Uncle Simon wrote how certain people, himself included, didn't doubt that there were a handful of legitimate cases, but they also believe the Michael Jackson hypothesis, as they put it, that one legit case sparked dozens of fake ones with each set of parents only looking for a payout. That one was a lot easier for people to believe, but then there were the priests who straight up believed all the cases were legitimate,

but didn't care because to them, the overall benefits of the church outweighed the negatives of the abusing priests. Uncle Simon lasted in that job for 10 years, a whole decade of ensuring that evil didn't get punished. And then one day it just caught up with him, I guess. He'd been living in his messed-up predatory echo chamber for so long that when he finally saw the light, it drove him nuts and turned him into a major alcoholic.

I get it too. Like if one day you realized you'd been a total piece of crap, like legitimately enabling evil to exist in the world, what else is there to do but isolate yourself, drink yourself into a stupor and just wait around to die. You failed at life in one of the worst ways possible, and I don't think people can come back from something like that. Once they found out what Simon really did for a living,

the way my uncle Steve dealt with it was just not talk about it. He didn't do therapy or anything like that. He just shut him away in a box somewhere in his mind and pretended he didn't even have a brother anymore. Simon was just some guy he happened to grow up with, who no longer deserved any thought. I remember asking if Uncle Steve had maybe forgotten the picture was there or if he kept one last picture of his brother to remember him by.

Aunt Janie said that it was definitely the latter. Steve knew that picture was in that album, and it wouldn't have mattered if he was blackout drunk. He wouldn't have brought it downstairs unless for some reason he wanted us to see it. We figured it might be a cry for help or something, and all that feeling was bubbling up after all those years. years. But to my knowledge, he never talked about it. I mean, maybe he did talk about it with my aunt and asked her not to broadcast what he said, but who knows? And I sure hope he did anyway,

because it's not healthy to keep that kind of pain buried inside like that. Not healthy at all. So I just wanted to tell you about my last date. His name was Greg, and he was perfect. I met him on Grindr, and I genuinely saw a future with this guy. And I guess there was a future, not a future that I could have ever predicted. Now, we chatted on the app for a few days before deciding on our first date. A lunch date picnic in the park. And I booked it during our lunch hour because, well, I was on my lunch hour, and I also knew that there'd be a bunch of other people around,

always important for a first date or a first time meeting a new person. Now, I'm not really new to the dating game. I'm the type of guy who struggles to settle down. Well, not yet anyway. and not that I sleep around or have multiple people on the go at once. I'm just really picky and I get tired at people's idiosyncrasies very quick. Now, I know this makes me kind of flaky and unappealing as a prospective partner, so I try and make up for that in other ways by keeping myself well-groomed and fit, etc.

I want people to give me a chance, even if I'm not always best at doing the same in kind. Now, Greg was wonderful. Mid-20s, I'm late 20s, he was very calm, gentle, almost quiet, a very thoughtful guy. Now, our lunch date ran longer because we spent so long talking about literature, art, movies, politics, you name it. Everything we could think to talk about, and we found very mutual interest in each of the topics. Now, you could say that we really clicked.

The date had to end because I could only be so late getting back to work, and I was feeling really good about this one, though. And it seemed as if Greg felt the same about me because he messaged me that same evening, saying that he'd had an amazing time and would I like to do it again? What would I? And so we arranged for another lunch date and this time on a day that we both had time off of work. Now I work as a junior lawyer at a firm and Greg. Well, he told me he worked in fashion.

Who really knows, though? We met at an olive garden and had another lovely time. Over breadsticks, I brought up the fact that I was bisexual. Now, this can be a showstopper for some gay men. There's all sorts of prejudice towards bisexual. from both sides of the fence, so I'd like to bring it up ASAP, and if it's going to be an issue, then there's plenty of time for both of us to just bail. Now, Greg seemed completely unbothered by this, and even asked about previous partners,

whether I thought it was easier being bisexual than gay or straight, and he told me he'd always considered that it would be harder for a variety of reasons. He was very sincere and sweet about it. He had a youthful curiosity about life that just really appealed to me. Now, for our third date, we went out for dead. dinner at a small, family-owned restaurant near my apartment. I like to eat late on weekends, and Greg was acquiescent to that, so I booked a table for nine, p.m., that is. Now, we had a delightful time. Neither of us drank, and I offered to order a bottle of wine, but Greg had

driven to the restaurant and told me that he wouldn't even have a sip of alcohol if he was driving, and I could respect that. And so the night played out wonderfully. It was just past midnight when we went out to the parking lot. And there, pressed against Greg's car, we shared our first kiss. I genuinely felt sparks and it was wonderful. Which is why it was a tiny bit puzzled when Greg bid me a good night, got into his car and drove off. He didn't even offer me a ride home or anything. I've been planning to invite him in, actually. And still, it didn't get to me too much, though. The kiss had clearly been full of passion and I don't think Greg had lost interest. He was probably trying to play it coy and hadn't quite landed it. And by the time I'd walked a few

blocks, I'd convinced myself it was just that. And when he sent me a message a couple of minutes later thanking me for an amazing night and implying that next time it should be an over-nighter, my fears were alleviated. At least my fears about Greg. The route back from that restaurant was about a half-hour's walk through suburbs, but in between the restaurant and my suburb, there was a shortcut through a forest path that would save about 10 minutes of walking. Now, when I say forest, it was more of a public park. So it had sporadic lighting, and although I wouldn't recommend it at night, I felt comfortably safe as a fit late-20s guy who works out and feel like I can handle myself in a fight. Now, that didn't stop me from feeling jumpy when I kept hearing twigs cracking

behind me, though. I'd walk a few feet in turn and absolutely certain that I'd heard rustling in the undergrowth. I'd walk a bit more, and suddenly branches would swish and a stick crunches, spin around again, and nothing, that kind of thing. Was there a shadow lurking past the tree line? I couldn't be sure, and instead I just stuck my head down and kept on walking through those woods. I heard a crack. Oh, there's definitely somebody there, and I called out. Hey, you got a problem, buddy? It was a stupid thing to say, and I always was a stupid thing to say, and I'll I got back was silence. Now, I stuck my hands in my pockets and just kept on walking. It was the middle of last summer, but a sudden chill had gone through my spine. There were these light

patters of rain beginning to hit my overcoat. Perfect, I thought. I sped up, convincing my inner machismo that it was due to the rain, not the fear of being stalked. Now, thankfully, I exited the forest and began walking the few blocks to the small, single-story suburban house. that I'd purchased from my parents when they moved to Florida. And I glanced around nervously over my shoulder and saw someone lingering under a streetlight. He wasn't looking at my direction, and he could have been anyone, but he hadn't been there when I walked past. And now it looks like he was standing still. I pretended to check my phone, keeping an eye on this guy, and I couldn't see his face, but he looked pretty built.

Or maybe he was just wearing layers. It was hard to tell. My night vision isn't the best, and he was right under the same. street lamp. Now, the best thing to do I decided was just ignore him, but I did reach in my pocket and grip my keys as a sort of makeshift weapon. Now, three more times on the walk back, I became absolutely certain that I was being followed. Every time I'd whip around and nobody would be there, except I'd always see leaves fluttering as if they'd just been disturbed or a bush seemed to be swaying as if someone had brushed past it, but I thought it was the wind. Now, one time again, I called out

asking if anyone was following me. And the porch light of a nearby house flicked on. I wasn't sure if it was a motion sensor or whether I'd just woken somebody up, so I kept on going. Now, I finally arrived home. My car was sat in the driveway, and I could see that the living room light was on through the huge bay windows that looked into the front yard, and I let myself in with my key. Honey, I'm home, I yelled. It was sort of a reoccurring joke, but I was also kind of trying to reassure myself.

My roommate Meg, not a real name, but she does love Family Guy, was up and, as usual, was burning the midnight oil and working on her dissertation. And that was her excuse anyways, as she was really just wanting the details of my date. She knew that I'd really been digging this Greg guy, and she and her boyfriend Simon were really hoping that I'd find someone to settle down with. She asked how things went, and I'd said I'd tell her all about it. So we made some drinks and took it into the living room. I took the couch and Meg took the single seat of recliner and we both put our cups on the table. I sort of leaned back satisfied and then the front window exploded. Yeah. Everything seemed to happen almost in slow motion.

I briefly caught movement outside in that darkness and then something hit the window, hard enough to send the glass shattering in an explosion of sparkling shards. No sooner had that happened than something distinct. distinctly man-sized, bursting through the open, sending further explosions of glass around the room. Now, this figure landed on his feet on our living room floor, shook himself like a goddamn dog shaking off water, shards of splintered glass flying everywhere, and me and Meg holding up our arms to protect our faces. This man screamed something indiscernible. Something like that, I don't even know, but I could hear dark, ragged breaths coming from him. Who was this? Some me.

meth head here at Arrabas, I thought, someone on bath salts, a neighbor, an Amazon delivery driver. All of these thoughts were bursting through my head in half a second. No. You already know who it is, right? It was Greg. And Greg gestured wildly at us with this tire iron that he just used to smash our front bay window in. I effing knew it!

He grunted again. I just stared at him in shock. Meg stared too, and of course she had no idea who he was at all, having only just seen him in one or two pictures on my phone. And here, he looked frantic and feral. I started to stand, but Greg swung that tire iron dangerously close to me, so I sat back down on the couch. I knew it, he said.

I knew you were married. I could see a pale band on your ring finger. You were hiding your wedding ring. This was, of course, complete nonsense. I'm not married and never have been. Whatever kind of paranoia Greg had about dating a married man, he must have projected it so hard onto me that he saw a clue that wasn't even there. So this is Greg?

Greg, this is my roommate Meg. And at that exact moment, at that exact perfect moment, The living room door bursts open, and Simon stumbles into the room, bleary-eyed with bedhead and clutching our baseball bat. And this is Meg's boyfriend, Simon, I added. Now, Greg just stared between the three of us. His expression changed like ten times in a matter of seconds. Fury, horror, fear, anger, sadness, nausea, fury again,

and then finally sort of bemused. Oh, well, sorry. Now, he couldn't even blame it on the alcohol. He didn't have a drop to drink that night. Now, what happened was Greg had previously suffered a couple of bad experiences with grinder dates. Go figure. Specifically straight or by curious men trying out the lifestyle with Greg without a care for his feelings. And he said it happened a lot, but I imagine it was more like once or twice.

And I got the impression that Greg felt for people easily, and he fell for them hard. So instead of waiting for me to break his heart, he decided to feign driving home and then parked away from the restaurant and followed me back on foot with the hopes of allaying his wild paranoia when he saw that I lived alone.

On the walk there, he'd managed to convince himself that he'd noticed a pale band of flesh on my ring finger in the restaurant's lighting, and that for some reason, this is why I'd only agreed to dates in the daytime before then, as if that made any kind of sense. Now, I don't think people like Greg ever made much sense

because he was clearly very, very mentally unwell and needed help. And that's why it killed me to call the cops and actually press charges because I knew that I had to because at least that might lead to him being forced to get help. Now, he didn't have to go to jail, but there was a fine, and I'm told that he underwent some court-appointed anger management nonsense. I don't think anger was his biggest problem, though. I think he needed help, but, hey, I'm not a doctor. I haven't been on any dates since Greg last summer,

not through Grindr or Tinder or any other means. And for now, I'm perfectly happy to work on myself platonically. Greg, if you're somehow listening to this, I wish you all the best, and I'm sure you'll make someone a great partner one day. But for you and I, please, let's not meet again. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. How to Thrive versus How to Survive this summer. For some, summer is their favorite season.

Travel picks up, kids are out of school, and adventure is the focus. For others, juggling it all can be tough and can lead to overwhelm and counting down the minutes until the kids are back in school. And many worry they're wasting the days of sunshine. During the summer, I try to make time to slow down and recharge, even when things get busy. whether it's getting outside for a walk, spending time with family and friends, or just taking a few quiet moments for myself, I've found that checking in on my mental health helps me enjoy the season a lot more. BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform with over 30,000 therapists and has happily helped more than 6 million people worldwide, boasting an impressive average rating of 4.9 out of 5 from over 1.7 million client reviews for their live sessions.

BetterHelp therapists work according to a strict code of conduct and are fully licensed in the U.S. BetterHelp takes care of the initial matching process, letting you concentrate on your therapy goals by filling out a quick questionnaire to pinpoint your needs and preferences. Our 12 plus years of experience in top-notch matching success means we usually hit the nail on the head right away. And if you're not loving your match, you can easily switch to another therapist from our personalized recommendations whenever you like. You don't have to say yes to everything this summer. Find support and therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash read.

That's betterhelp.com slash read. So I can't be too generous with the details because this is obviously a very personal thing for both me and my immediate family. But to give you a bit of background, I grew up in the United Kingdom to a very moderate Muslim family. And by very moderate, I mean none of my sisters

wear hijabs, the traditional hair covering, we own Christmas jumpers and have Christmas dinner, and I only go to mosque maybe once a year around Eid. Now, we pray five times a day, and we like praying together as a family when possible. And we also abstain from booze and bacon, and although my mom loves cooking Italian, and oh my God, she so wants to be Italian,

she always uses halal meat. Now, I say all this to paint a picture of my family, and the same thing applies to my extended family. family too. And it's a member of that extended family that this story is all about. In September of last year, so 2024, me and my sister were reminiscing over Snapchat. We got talking about a party that we went to when I was six and she was eight and how we fell out because I refused to wear a different colored dress than her. And then I remember laughing about how petty we were when I had this weird kind of flashback and saw an older boy's

face and some long, dormant memory. Now, I did a quick mental inventory, counted all of our cousins in my head, and then realized that he was a spare. And by that, I mean, I couldn't quite remember if he was a relative or not. In the end, it was just me and my sister who group texted our mom to get her to settle it once and for all. But then, the strangest thing happened. We knew this boy was real. I mean, all our brothers and sisters remembered who we were talking about, but when we asked Mom, she denied all knowledge. We were texting her, like, was he this auntie's son or that auntie's son, thinking that mom's going to suddenly remember and say, oh, yeah, I remember now.

But she didn't. She just kept on saying that she didn't remember until it actually got kind of weird. Now, the next time I was home, I went through all the family albums trying to find a photo of the boy that I was talking about. and there were a lot of old photos of birthday parties, iftars, and Eid celebrations, but I didn't see the face of that older boy anywhere. It got to the point where I started to feel a bit mental, but I knew that I wasn't just imagining stuff,

and so I ended up asking my dad if he remembered who I was talking about, and when I did, he started acting very, very cagey. Now, he got this almost frightened look about him and then couldn't hide the nervousness in his voice when he said, Have you asked your mom? Now, he might as well have said that spy thing. You know the one. I can neither confirm nor deny the existence of blah, blah, blah.

That's basically an omission that blah blah exists or had happened. And so I knew something weird was going on when he too offered only a very cagey denial. Now, I might have uncovered some kind of family spiracy, but I hadn't traveled all the way home for winter break just to play detective and annoy my parents. Now, I thought about it once or twice, and I spoke to my sister about it too, who agreed something weird was definitely going on. But it was only when Mum invited me to go through her books, to see which ones I fancy taking back to uni, that I accidentally blew the whole thing wide open. I was standing in front of Mum's bookcase, taking certain books down to read the blurbs on the back. And then after I pulled this larger hard cover out, I saw a photograph fall out from between the pages.

It was a family photograph, like many others we had in the house, but then I saw him, that spare boy from my memory of the party, and I remember gasping when I saw his face. He looked a little bit younger than my memory, but it was definitely him, and I had finally had evidence of his existence right there in my hand. I found Mom in the kitchen, showed her the photo, and then asked her to please try and remember who he was. I didn't make any demands because I knew that she couldn't play dumb. any longer, and I asked her why the photo was in the book, and then I just watched her sigh. Mom took the photo from me, told me we needed to talk in private, and took me upstairs to my bedroom. It was actually kind of a rush to have almost, like, uncovered a clue, you know, but whatever mom was about to tell me did not seem like it was going to be good news.

She told me the boy was an older cousin of mine, one who I'll just call Zach, and that he'd moved away to university when I was just starting primary school. But sadly, while he was there, something very tragic happened to him. Assuming there had been some kind of incident, I asked if Zach had passed away, but only felt even more confused when my mom said that we didn't know if he was with us or not. He was just missing. I understood why I hadn't been told until I needed to be told, But when I suggested going to visit my auntie to pay my respects and tell her Albahtari, Mom shook her head. I also understood that parents protect their kids from certain painful truths,

but I didn't understand it one bit when Mom said that, and I'm using her words here, we don't talk about him anymore. I was very taken aback. A cousin of ours had disappeared while studying at uni, and we just didn't talk about him anymore? I thought that was absolutely outrageous and I made a rare demand of my mom to tell me more. But all she'd said was that Zach had gone missing during his studies and that we hadn't heard from him since. And it was Mom's decision not to talk about him anymore and the family respected that by not having any photos of him around or in any of the albums, because the last thing Mom and Dad wanted was to dredge up painful memories for her.

Mom did hide that photo in the book. She never admitted it, but I knew it was because she couldn't bring herself to throw away every photo of Zach. All I wanted to know was why, but trying to get her to tell me only started a massive fight. We made up the next morning, and everything was fine until I went back to uni after winter break. But when she dropped me off at the station, Mom warned me not to talk to my aunt about it. She understood I'd be curious, but she wasn't made. making it up when she said that my aunt wouldn't want to talk about it. She made me promise her that I wouldn't try it, and I did. I promised her. But God forgive me. It was a promise I didn't

keep, and sometimes I think I'd do just about anything to be able to turn back the clock and properly honor that promise. The only clue mom had given me regarding Zach's disappearance was the time of year that it occurred. I don't know if it was deliberate, or if it just slipped out when she was describing how it happened, but she told me that Zach hadn't come home for winter break. And that's when it all started. Mid-December, so while I'd missed the anniversary of it by about three weeks, I knew my aunt still had it on her mind in the way that people do have stuff on their minds when it comes to certain anniversaries. And so after getting dropped off at the station, I chose not to catch my train. I told myself I'd catch the next one, which was roughly two hours

from then, and in the meantime, I'd go buy some flowers and drop them off in my aunt's house. Now, I couldn't bear to think of her and my uncle, dealing with all that heartache alone, but I also couldn't be overt with my condolences. I decided that I'd just write, I'm sorry, thinking of you in this difficult time, without signing my name and then leave them on their doorstep before disappearing into the night. I brought the flowers, wrote the note, and then caught the bus to my aunt's housing estate. I had my scarf up over my face and I had this new woolly hat on that neither my aunt or uncle would recognize, and I even tried writing the note and block capitals to try and throw them off. But then as much as I felt good

about myself in my attempt to comfort them, things took a drastic turn for the worse, and as quickly as that very next morning. Early that next morning, I got a call from my aunt, and the moment her name appeared on my phone screen, I thought, uh-oh. I answered the call, trying to sound innocent and apologize for not calling around to visit them while I had the chance. But then my auntie spoke, and I knew that I'd been found out somehow. She asked me, and very seriously I might add, if I'd left anything on her doorstep that previous evening. And since I couldn't lie to her, I just admitted to it and said, yes, I did. I was scared that she'd start screaming at me or something, or that she'd tell my

mom and get her to do the shouting. But she didn't, and instead, my mom asked if I was free to chat for some time that week. And when it came time to the meeting, waiting for her to arrive was really nerve-wracking. I had a horrible feeling that it'd be a lot of, we're not angry, we're just disappointed type thing, which I'm sure that you all agree is way worse than parents just being angry with you. But when my aunt arrived, she seemed a lot more happy to see me than I thought she would be. She wasn't angry with me. She wasn't even disappointed. It was just something really important that I needed to know,

and she wasn't going to enjoy telling me. And so after getting comfortable and making us cups of tea, my aunt asked me to fill her in on what I already knew. Now, obviously, all I knew was that Zach had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, but to her, the circumstances weren't mysterious at all. The issue wasn't so much that he'd vanished. it was that Zach had let my aunt know exactly where he was and exactly what he was doing. My aunt said that when he first went missing, Zach wasn't responding to any texts or calls.

He was supposed to arrive home on a Friday evening in December. Then when my aunt hadn't heard from him by about midnight, she called the police to tell them something was wrong. My aunt said that she had this terrible feeling that he'd had a car accident on an icy road and was dead in a ditch somewhere. But not even 24 hours passed before the police called her back to say that they'd found Zach's car in an airport car park. Now, my aunt said that she went from relieved to worried again because Zach hadn't mentioned anything

about flying anywhere. Then when she asked where it'd gone, the police told her he'd flown out of the UK on the same day that she'd reported him missing and that he'd flown to Turkey. My aunt had next to no bloody clue what he'd flown to Turkey for. He wasn't the type to jet off on some lad's holiday without saying anything, and it wasn't like he'd have to conceal some romantic getaway with a girlfriend because they didn't mind if he dated responsibly. And the police said that they'd be in touch because they were in the process of reaching out to Turkish authorities. But between then, and when they called her back, my auntie ended up mentioning the disappearance to a friend.

Yet when she mentioned the word Turkey, her friend's face turned ashen. God bless her, but my auntie doesn't exactly keep up with the current events because she had to have had her friend fill her in on why Zach's trip to Turkey had alarmed her so much. She'd heard some stuff on the news about a terrorist group in the Middle East. But without trying to sound flippant, when has that not been the case? Some of my earliest memories are of watching the news and seeing soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, so I totally understood what my aunt thought, same crap different day when she caught bits on the news. What she didn't realize was that a significant number of young British men and women were using Turkey as a staging post to be smuggled into another country. Syria.

These people, who tended to be between the ages of 15 to 30, weren't off on their holidays or romantic weekends with partners. They were out to join a group which had been called many different things and many different countries. but here they were called ISIS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. My auntie's family were very similar to ours and very strict with their Islam. Zach was allowed to date, and he went to the pub for a J-20 after five-aside football, and as far as my auntie knew, he was just about as far from an extremist as it was possible to get. And so this turkey thing was either a romantic getaway, or, as my uncle suggested, a trip to Istanbul to watch his football team play away.

Now, my aunt said that she wasn't in the least bit worried about Zach joining some bloody terror group, but then a few days later, she got a call from some kind of special constable who asked to visit her for a chat at home. My auntie is an oncology nurse, so she knew that it had to be bad news of the constable was delivering it in person. Then, much like me and her over cups of tea, the policewoman revealed their findings gently, and gradually, like they were lowering her into a hot bath. Not all at once, just a little bit at a time. Authorities and turkeys were able to determine that Zach had de-plained in Istanbul and then had immediately boarded another flight to a city closer to the Syrian border.

They were also able to track his movements to a hotel in that same city, but when they searched the room, they found it empty. The Turkish police then questioned the hotel staff and discovered a young man matching Zach's description have been spotted meeting an older man in the lobby. The staff remembered it because one man spoke Arabic with a distinctly Syrian kind of accent, while the other spoke it like he was still learning. Police were 90% sure that it was Zach who'd met with the Syrian guy, in which case there was a chance that that was his guide to help him get into Syria,

and one of the reasons Zach might go to Syria was to join a terrorist organization. The policewoman in the UK didn't know if that was ISIS or the tons of other groups fighting against the Syrian government. But if he hadn't told my aunt, there was a good chance that it'd be something that she wouldn't approve of, meaning that there was a very distinct possibility that Zach had joined ISIS. Like I said, the policewoman broke it to her very gently, saying that they didn't know for sure what Zach was up to. She asked my aunt to forward them any emails or text that he might send or the details of any phone calls that she had with her son. I don't think that they do that with regular missing person cases,

so that's what makes me think that they already knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. My aunt, on the other hand, refused to believe it. She said that she spent a few days in blissful denial until an email finally appeared in her work inbox. It was from Zach, and while he would have considered it an apology, and an explanation, the police considered it nothing short of a typed confession. Zach didn't say exactly where he was, or even that he joined a particular group.

He just said he was really sorry he didn't tell her, and he knew that she'd have stopped him if he did, and that he was fighting to protect the Syrian people from their government. The police later said Zach had most likely been coached on what to say, and that ISIS were doing what a lot of militaries did around the world, which was getting the recruits to email home, to reassure friends and loved ones. It also served as a kind of recruitment tool by saying,

it's really nice over here, and that's just what Zach said. He said that he was happy to be in the caliphate, which is the Arabic word meaning religious state. They also said that he'd been welcomed like a hero, and that his ISIS commander had given him, and a few other British lads, a week's free stay in a luxury hotel, so they could acclimatize to the weather before their training started.

Zach said that after that week was up, he wouldn't be able to reply to any emails for a while because they could only send them on secure connections or something. Now, my aunt also said that he seemed to think that once he'd laid out his reasons and all of that, my aunt might actually be proud of him. But she wasn't proud of him. She was terrified. She sent him an email back telling him to come home as soon as he was able, but he didn't reply for a couple of weeks. and when he did, my aunt said that he sounded brainwashed.

In his email, the things Zach said sounded so unlike him that my aunt thought that someone else might have written it. Zach liked football, hip-hop, and was happy as Larry being at university with his mates. But in that email, he talked about jihad, martyrdom, and how much he hated the kufar, the Arabic word for unbelievers. He was misquoting scripture and religious rulings to excuse, what he'd done. And then in response to my aunt saying that she couldn't picture her little boy hurting anyone, he said that he wasn't her little boy anymore, and that the people he hurt

weren't people at all, so she shouldn't feel bad if he hurt or even killed them. At one point in the email, Zach tried reassuring my aunt that not everyone he captured would be killed. For the most part, the women and kids he captured would either be kept as his own personal slaves or would make him rich after being sold in the slave markets. And as I said, my aunt struggled to believe that he'd written things like that. He didn't sound like her son at all. But then there were certain phrases and nicknames that he used to confirm for her that it had to be him. My aunt said that she ended up crying her eyes out with that policewoman over her,

and that the policewoman was struggling to hold back tears. She was a mom too, and she told my aunt that she could barely even imagine the pain that she was going through. There was also very little that they could do at that point because Turkish authorities couldn't pursue him into Syria. And the best my aunt could do was reply to the emails Zach had sent, begging him to come home while tugging on his heartstrings. She did as the policewoman asked and wrote him long, heartfelt emails touching on his childhood, how much everyone loved him, and how he wouldn't get into that much trouble if he just came home and cooperated with the police. She had to wait weeks for another reply,

and when it came, she hoped that what she'd said had gotten through to him. But it hadn't. Quite the opposite, actually, because what Zach wrote was even worse than before. He'd completed his training and his first mission. His unit had been ordered to attack a Kurdish village in the north of Syria. The defenders fought fiercely, but were eventually overrun, and then all the civilians were gathered in one place. Zach said they separated the men from the women and kids,

and then one by one, and they dragged the men into an open field and cut their heads off. Zach said he personally beheaded a man who prayed to some other God before he was killed. He said that confirmed what he was doing was the right thing, and that they hadn't sent him to kill other Muslims but unbelievers. All that was obviously massively upsetting for my auntie, but she said the worst thing about it was the glee with which he wrote his email. Zach acted like killing people and forcing women and kids into slavery,

was his single greatest achievement. He acted like it was as one-way ticket to Jenna al-Ferduz, the highest tier of heaven. And even though there is tons of stuff in the Quran which tells us not to hurt innocent people, only aggressors who threaten us in our homelands, though. One quote is from verse 32 of Sarah al-Madeh, and it says, Whoever takes a life, it will be as if they killed all of humanity, and whoever saves a life, it will be as if they saved them. saved all of humanity. My aunt wrote that into one of her emails, but Zach only addressed it

in a roundabout way, saying people were misquoting the Quran to justify Muslims being weak and not defending themselves. It was like Zach was ignoring everything which told him to be peaceful in favor of any verse that might possibly justify terrorism and murder. And it broke my auntie's heart so badly that I don't think she's ever going to fully recover. She emailed him back, once again, begging Zach to come home, and then she waited for a reply that never came. That email, talking about the attack and cutting people's heads off, was the last time my auntie ever heard from Zach. According to the people from the home office, they think it's more than likely that

Zach was killed, either during an attack or from a bomb dropped on him. She'd once hoped that he'd suddenly returned home after ISIS's little terror kingdom fell apart, but again, he didn't. And there were no emails, no texts or calls, just a dead silence on his end, and he was never seen again. When she was done telling her story, my aunt asked me if I understood why she didn't want to talk about him anymore. I did. I could understand why she was so ashamed, angry and upset, and I could understand why she didn't want any pictures of him around to remind her. Zach was dead, and even if he wasn't, the boy she raised. was long gone. It wasn't even that she'd purged all thoughts of him from her mind. It's because

she thought about him almost every minute of every day. She just didn't need anything to remind her of what her mind already tortured her with. I don't think I fit the picture that people imagine when I say lesbian GameStop manager, but that's who I am. I wasn't a manager when this happened, just a lesbian GameStop. And it was when I had been a GameStop. And it was when I had been a GameStop. for about a year and a half at around October 2014 when it was about 22. We were still in the era where a conventionally feminine female gamer was something of an oddity, at least in my town, and we're long past that, thank God, but it could get a bit tiresome. Now, you're probably imagining my story's going to involve the worst in a long line of terrifying

in-cell male gamers hitting on me at work after crawling out of mom's basement. Now, maybe that happened occasionally, but honestly, in my experience, That whole stereotype is just played up and played out and nowhere near as common as people think. And now your listeners are going to be calling fake or plant or whatever, but I swear this has always been my genuine experience. I know there are plenty of weird gamer bros out there, but well, I think this story itself is proof of why you can simply never tell who's going to be like what. It was October and GameStop were bringing in some extra staff ready for Christmas, and particularly the release of GTA 5 on PS4 and Xbox 1 that month. And so I wasn't surprised to see one or two new faces,

but I was surprised when one of them was another girl. I was glad that I'd have someone for some girl talk, and what I wasn't looking for was a relationship. I was with someone at the time, so I didn't even consider that's where her mind could have instantly been going. She was a bit shorter than me, with a nose ring and a bad green-blue and pink dye job to her badly cut hair. It's easy to be uncharitable now because I know what kind of person Amanda is,

but I hope I didn't cast judgment on her at the time. She was just a normal, young, alternative girl, really. It's just now looking back that she developed into a monster in my mind because she truly is one. Amanda was really intensely friendly with me, but in a way, she tried to hide with some very sarcastic ambivalence. I didn't pick up on this at the time. I just felt a bit confused. And it was like she was bursting at the seams to get to know me, but wanted to play it cool and act like she didn't care. She had this weird way of speaking where she'd start out talking really fast, and then slow down after the first sentence like she was mentally putting the brakes on, kind of like Nardwar. Now when we first met, she'd rushed over ahead of our manager,

Dan, and already introduced herself. She abruptly gave me a hug, which took me a back. Co-workers didn't just typically hugged me so I wasn't used to it happening all of a sudden. Also, I'm not particularly a huggy person when it comes to strangers especially. And she told me she was Amanda, even though Dan had already introduced her. And then she said something like, we're going to be working together. Isn't that so cool? She said this like we knew each other from school or something, like we were old friends. Now, I probably paused too long scanning her face, trying to place if I actually did know her.

Now, she told me that we'd gone to high school together, and I had this very sinking feeling. Had I shared classes with this girl and completely forgotten or ignored her? And then she added that she came to GameStop all the time. Now, it later turned out that the reason that I didn't remember her from high school was that she'd started her freshman year when I was a senior. Now, we didn't have classes together or even know each other or have mutual friends or anything like that. We'd simply attended the same high school for one year. And of course, because we were both women, I was put in charge of Amanda.

Now, showing her the ropes and teaching her how to work the register, how to take inventory the usual, I was kind of flattered that they trusted me enough to have another employee shadowing me, since I hadn't even worked there myself for two years. Now, things were fine with Amanda at first, if a little intense. She'd always stand right next to me when I showed her things, kind of pressed up against me, and she was almost a head shorter than me,

but sometimes she'd lean in so close that I could even smell her breath. And God, her breath reeked. I don't know what it was. It wasn't standard bad breath. It was something that she'd eaten. I'm sure of it. Like boiled eggs or something,

but I never actually saw her eating egg. It was unpleasant to the point of unbearable, and it took all my willpower not to recoil away on more than one occasion. Now, Amanda just did not click with me. I didn't enjoy her company or find her interesting to talk to. Amanda felt differently, though.

She would constantly find excuses to talk to me or hang around, on break, and during work hours, and she would talk non-stop about things she liked or movies she'd seen or bands she listened to, and of course, games she played. Now, I very quickly noticed a pattern with all the things that she talked about. She was constantly telling me things that she liked or hated, just bombarding me with information about things like she was trying to force her tastes on me in the weirdest of ways. She'd never stopped to ask if I'd listen to said band or watch said movie or what my opinions were on any of the things that she was talking about. She would just sort of go on about how much she liked, say, one direction, or The Conjuring, or Marvel movies or some such.

I didn't really pick up on it at the time, but there was no defining genres or themes or any personalities to her taste. It was like she was just sort of naming random popular things at the time to talk about that had no connection to one another or painted any real picture of her ideas. identity. If you've ever met someone like this, you'll know what I mean. Like they're not a real person. She obviously did watch the movies and listened to the bands and play the games, but she would talk about them relentlessly. She usually loved the things she talked about, but occasionally hated them to the point of almost unsettling rage. But it was just the most bland, wide-ranging set of subjects, like someone googled popular things and was just checking them off. Now, eventually I had enough, and I had to ask Amanda to chill in.

give me a bit of space, and it was kind of driving me insane. I sort of expected her to take it badly, now what I didn't expect her to do was try and kill me and then act like nothing happened. I would cycle to and from work in those days. I had a license, but my apartment was close, and I didn't want the cost of vehicle upkeep, and so I always kept my bike in great condition. But one night, cycling home in the dark, my brakes failed at the bottom of a hill, and I came skidding off into the gutter. Now, it could have been much, much worse. There was one intersection on the way home, and that could have been lethal. I know those brakes have been screwed with. They hadn't been cut or anything. The nuts were just loose, causing the grip to slip and not function immediately. Just the

type of thing that I was pretty meticulous about checking when I did my weekly upkeep on the bike. Now, I didn't mention the bike incident to anyone at work because I didn't have proof, and I could have been completely wrong. But it was just a couple of days after that, when Amanda's demeanor towards me completely changed, she was still as overly friendly as possible, still forcing her company on to me whenever she could at work, albeit slightly less often, but this is where things did a 180 to become intrusive. Instead of ranting at me about pieces of pop culture, she suddenly switched to relentless questioning. What movies had I watched that week? What games was I playing? What's my favorite song?

Who were my favorite bands? What shows were good? What did I recommend? Just constantly a barrage of questions. There was no pause to take in information or to discuss anything I brought up. She wasn't actually listening to my answers, or at least I didn't think so. And soon, what felt like a spark of interest became insulting, and I realized that it wasn't worth answering properly because she didn't actually care. And so I'd give a brief abrupt answers to pretend that I hadn't heard. And then she started asking about things that weren't pop culture related. Where did I live? Did I like anyone at work? Who would I dated in high school?

Stuff like that. And thankfully, that only went on for a couple of days and I managed to avoid having to give her any personal information. But good Lord, I didn't think that I could have taken this for long without snapping. Now, I'm not sure why I decided to answer her and so confidently, too, when she asked me if I had a partner. I don't know if I was hoping that maybe she had a whole bunch of homophobia. waiting in the wings and would just leave me alone when she found out that I was gay. I have no idea why I'd have assumed that she didn't already know, and so I told her I'd been with Laura, my girlfriend since 2012, and we were thinking of moving in together.

Amanda, I swear to God, went white. She literally started trembling slightly, and it was actually concerned that she was having a seizure or something. Now I asked her if she was okay. Amanda nodded, staring at me in a deep, intent way that gave me chills to this day. And then suddenly she blurted out some kind of sentiment like, I'm so happy for you. And swept me up in a huge, overly tight, uncomfortable hug, and then step back beaming, as if nothing had ever been wrong. Now, this was obviously the point that I knew something was very off about Amanda. Thankfully, she wouldn't be in my life much longer, but it gets oh, so worse before it gets better. Amanda became absolutely.

obsessed with The Last of Us. Now that sounds part for the course in 2024, but back then the sequel wasn't yet out, and we had the original and then the remastered version on PS4 and Xbox. And Amanda actually bought a copy of The Last of Us remastered that same day, but I thought nothing of it at all. Why would I? Everyone was buying it. Now one day, Amanda walked up to me in the break room and literally thrust that Last of Us box into my face.

Now, I remember what she said next precisely because it was so insane. I would love a relationship like that. Someone who will fight through the zombie apocalypse for me. Then she paused, with a girl, she added, staring intently at me. She had this real piercing yet blank stare, this expectant stare that says everything and nothing all at once, and the more you get to know the person, the more vacant and creakened. It seems.

Now, I said that was cool, something vaguely dismissive. She says, I think I'd make a good lesbian. I just responded in silence. Yeah, I think I'd be good at pleasuring other girls. What? I was still in silence. I'm attracted to girls. To other girls.

Now, me in silence, and at this point, I am cringing internally so hard my ovaries feel like they're going to explode. Yes, I realize that I'm attracted to girls because... And I should begun to say this. Blessed Hail Mary, the door opened and our co-worker Matt walked in. Now, Matt is the goofy, cheerful type who takes nothing seriously, and you can never really get mad at him thanks to that. Hey, I'm also attracted to girls. He said jovially.

Now, I could have kissed him at that point for absolutely decimating the tension. and man, if hateful looks could kill, though. Amanda could have been on trial for murder at that point, as she glared at Matt in a way that I'd never seen anyone glared anyone else before. Even Matt, completely unfazed by anything, stopped in his tracks. He was clearly taken aback and asked if something was wrong. I protested, laughing, and insisted emphatically that it wasn't. And anyway, my break was over and I was due to get back on the store floor.

Now that night I called Matt up and decided to finally tell someone else at work how uncomfortable Amanda was beginning to make me. Now, up until now, I just kept it to myself and Laura because I'd feel like crap if I'd affected someone else's employment because they made me personally uncomfortable. But today had just been super weird and creepy and, like Laura said, we'd be expected to immediately act if a guy behaved like that towards a woman. Matt wasn't dismissive. He actually took it very seriously and said that he had. to help me swap shifts if I needed to avoid Amanda, and then in the meantime, I should stick near him and he'd make sure that I wasn't caught alone with Amanda at work. And to this day, I really appreciated that. A week later, I received the first note. I found it in my jacket pocket when I got home one day after

work. You're a cock-teasing little bitch. Stop leading me on. From Matt, it said. And so I showed it to Laura, and then I called up Matt and told him what Amanda had done. Because, of course, it was freaking Amanda, not Matt. Now, we decided to wait and try to catch Amanda in the act, and it was the only way to ensure that something could be done. There was no real danger of anyone actually believing the notes were from Matt, but there would be no way to prove that they were from Amanda either. It took another two weeks and another three notes before we caught Amanda at it.

Now, during that time, I made a point of avoiding Matt. No confrontations, no mention of anything, but I wanted to give the impression that I was at least wary and buying it. And the second note had also slipped into my pocket during work. This one said something about me being a series of slurs that applied to queer people and howl I'll burn in hell. And the next note was taped to the seat of my bike and said much of the same. Only this time it was written on some toilet paper, unused, thankfully. In the end, we caught her by pure freaking chance. We've been trying to come up with a great plan to catch her in the act, and in the end,

we just walked in on her slipping the note inside this Tupperware container that held my lunch. Of course, she tried to protest immediately. She'd seen Matt putting something in my lunch, so she wanted to check it out. I said I didn't believe her. So she tried to stab me in the eye with a fork. One minute I was yelling at her, and the next minute, a fork was flying towards my face, held by a snarling Amanda, and she went from one to 100 in a second. I tried to fight her off, holding a wrist, trying to keep the fork away from my freaking face. With her other hand,

she was clawing at my stomach trying to, I don't know. She knew I had a belly button piercing, and she was trying to rip it out. I shoved her away hard, and she slammed against the refrigerator. I looked for something, anything I could grab, and there it was. a master chief replica helmet that a manager had put in the break room. And he was so proud of that thing, and we weren't supposed to touch it on pain of death. But I figured he'd probably understand when the alternative was my death. And so I snatched up that master chief helmet, the pride of GameStop, and swung it as hard as I could straight into Amanda's face.

The helmet crunched and so did her nose. Blood exploded over the prop replica. a man hooted and tried to lunge at me with that fork again, and I swear to God this was the most satisfying moment of my entire life. I'll never get it back. I swung my leg back and planted a kick right into her crotch, as hard as I freaking could. She dropped like a sack of potatoes.

The manager came rushing in after hearing the commotion and so did Matt. It wasn't hard to prove that there was no way Matt could have put the note in my lunch and circled back around to the shop floor, met up with me and then re-entered the break room. There were witnesses. And when Amanda started yelling about how Matt had confided in her that he was obsessed with me and how I kept rejecting him, well, that's when we didn't even have to try proving her guilt anymore. And so I asked her why she tried to stab me in the eye with a fork, and her answer was, to protect me from Matt. You literally could not make this stuff up. One other funny twists of this, though, is because Amanda never bothered

to actually learn anything about me, the object of her obsession, she had no idea that Matt is my first cousin. And so that's how my weird, creepy, obsessive GameStop co-worker got fired for trying to frame my cousin for harassing me. Obviously, the cops got involved, and Amanda was going to be charged with harassment and attempted assault. And in the end, though, we had to settle out of court because I'd smashed her face in with that Spartan-117 helmet, and while things would have likely turned out in my favor, I didn't want to go through the prolonged court case when we could just settle. At least she was banned from the mall, though. Now, I found Amanda on Facebook a couple of years ago. Obviously, I didn't add her, but it was remarkable to see how much she'd visually

changed. She married to a man and has two very young kids, and I really hope that she's changed as a person and isn't an insane melting pot just waiting to bubble over. I hope she dealt with whatever sickness caused her to act the way she did towards me. When I last looked on her Facebook, which she keeps publicly visible to all, I saw that she'd recently become the youngest ever board member of her area's local HOA. So as to whether she's less crazy now, who can honestly say? What feels like a long time ago now, I went to stay with some relatives over the holidays. Late on Christmas Day, the party was winding down, and I was sitting with my uncle and a few others while we finished off a bottle or two. My aunt and uncle decorated their kitchen almost

entirely with pictures of themselves and my cousins, so we spent quite a while looking at each of them and either reminiscing or harmlessly poking fun. I remember we were laughing at one picture because my uncle's 70s hair was absolutely hilarious. Then as he took it all in good humor, he got up and said something like, if you think that's funny, wait until you see Aunt Janie's hair from the 80s. She thought she was Grace Jones. Now we're thinking no way,

and my aunt tells him that he's a dead man if he brings those photo albums down from their bedroom. But my uncle didn't listen, and somehow he lived to see another day. Aunt Janie's hair was cool as heck, by the way. And then since my uncle brought down a whole box full of photo albums for us to flick through, we started passing them around.

I found myself flicking through this one album that contained much older photos than the others. And then in one photo, a man I first mistook for my Uncle Steve, whose home I was staying at, was standing in a church while wearing some kind of ceremonial Catholic robe. Now, don't laugh at me. I don't know the names of those things. But admittedly, I was pretty drunk, so the first thing out of my mouth was like, holy crap, Uncle Steve. When the heck were you a priest? Now, he was pretty drunk, too, so for a second he says, I've never been...

And then he shot me this look like he'd just done something he shouldn't. Then, and he wasn't mean or aggressive about it, but he quickly took the album away, saying, I think we've seen enough from this one. Now, I'm wondering why he's all embarrassed about it, but when Aunt Janie realized what was happening, she immediately rose from her seat, took the album, and returned it upstairs. And when she returned, I asked her what the deal with her. was and why she seemed so desperate to remove that particular album. She said that she didn't want to

spoil the evening, so she'd tell me all about it in the morning. And the next morning, after a very hungover breakfast, I waited for an opportune moment to ask my Aunt Janie about the photo I saw. She sighed and said something like, I've been hoping you've forgotten all about that. But she stayed true to her word, put on a pot of coffee, and started telling me the story. And so the first thing you need to know, is that the man in the religious clothing was not my uncle Steve. It was his non-identical twin, Simon. They still looked hellasimilar, but had apparently taken very different paths in life because Simon went off to join the seminary or whatever after college. Now, I thought it was odd that I was only just getting an introduction to him, but over the course of the next half hour or so, it made

total sense why no one talked about him anymore. After graduating from the seminary, now don't crucify me, by the way, I don't know how it all works, my uncle Simon ended up moving to Nebraska. He worked here on the East Coast for a while, but then was offered some big shot job working for the church way over in Lincoln, and so that's where he went. He stayed in Lincoln for around 10 years, and then one day he forwarded Uncle Steve a new address and a phone number. Steve thinks he's been promoted or something, and so he calls to congratulate him. But Uncle Simon hadn't been promoted. He'd retired from the church, yet he wasn't some senior.

He was in his mid-30s. Uncle Steve thought that Simon sounded weird on the phone, so he drove all the way out to see him at his new place to make sure that it was okay. Well, Uncle Simon was not okay. He was drinking a whole bunch and said that he'd lost his faith and had basically given up on the world. Uncle Steve figured that he was having some kind of early-onset midlife crisis and stayed with him until he got his drinking under control.

And then once he was on his feet again, Steve drove home and monitored his brother by phone instead. He called him one day, and then once every couple of days and then once a week. And by the time the calls were a week, Simon was saying something about writing a book and trying to get it published. He had a bunch of savings from his work with the church, and since he was acting stable, Uncle Steve figured that Simon was over the worst of his midlife crisis. They kept in touch, just not in the regular, but then one day, Uncle Steve called his brother and found that he wasn't answering his phone. He got so worried that he drove out to Nebraska to check on him personally, but when he arrived,

he found Simon had passed away in his sleep. Uncle Steve later said that finding his brother's body like that was the worst thing that ever happened to him, but since he was so focused on reporting, he was so focused on reporting. the death to the cops, and not compromising on what might have been a crime scene, he didn't take a detailed look around Simon's house, meaning he and his family had to wait about a week or two to get a full picture of what caused his death. And so the first thing that Uncle Steve found out was that Simon died from some kind of liver disease caused by his drinking.

He'd apparently started up again in secret, and it all just caught up with him one day in the worst possible way. And then, once they were clear to collect his belongings, things, Steve found out why his brother had started drinking again, and that it's all to do with that book that he was writing. Now, this was back in the early 90s, so Simon had one of those electronic word processors to write with. Well, Steve ends up taking it home and asked it to print out what's stored on it, and it prints out everything Simon had written over the past couple of weeks. It turns out Simon's book was about his time in the church, but it read like a

damn confession. Basically, the big high-profile job that he'd been given in Lincoln was essentially a public relations role, and that his job was to maintain good relations between the Catholic Church and the people of Nebraska. But this was a PR role unlike any other, because the specifics involved visiting the families of children who had been abused by priests or whoever, and convincing them not to take any legal action. And he did this by telling them the offending priests would be moved and,

also by offering them pretty measly amounts of cash, considering these kids would be scarred for life, obviously. If they didn't comply, he'd move on to threatening them with countersuits and whatnot, saying that it'd be much easier and much less costly for them to just move on. Now, you might think that that kind of thing only happens maybe once every few years or so, or if you're naive to the Catholic Church, that is. But for those that aren't, well, I'm guessing you're already wise to the fact that there were a lot of these cases for Uncle Simon to deal with.

There was a time when he had one family a week, sometimes too, if the schedule got a little congested, and he wasn't just confined in Nebraska either. He traveled to all the surrounding states, using either the carrot or the stick to convince these poor victimized families to take the money and shut up for the good of the church. And the way they justified this, the church, I mean, was absolutely nightmarish. First off, there was a running narrative among certain priests that the kids were responsible for tempting the clergy,

and that the encounters in certain cases were very much consensual. Now, I can't even begin to wrap my head around the disgustingly perverted logic of that, and how someone could convince themselves that that was the case, but I can kind of understand the next group, who thought certain parents were just trying to get money out of the church. Uncle Simon wrote how certain people, himself and clear, didn't doubt that there were a handful of legitimate cases, but they also believed the Michael Jackson hypothesis, as they put it, that one legit case sparked dozens of fake ones

with each set of parents only looking for a payout. That one was a lot easier for people to believe, but then there were the priests who straight up believed all the cases were legitimate, but didn't care because to them, the overall benefits of the church outweighed the negatives of the abusing priests. Uncle Simon lasted in that job for ten years, a whole decade of ensuring that evil didn't get punished, and then one day it just caught up with him, I guess. He'd been living in his messed-up predatory echo chamber for so long that when he finally saw the light, it drove him nuts and turned him into a major alcoholic.

I get it too. Like if one day you realized you'd been a total piece of crap, like legitimately enabling evil to exist in the world, what else is there to do but isolate yourself, drink yourself into a stupor, and just wait around to die. You failed at life in one of the worst ways possible, and I don't think people can come back from something like that. Once they found out what Simon really did for a living, the way my uncle Steve dealt with it was just not talk about it. He didn't do therapy or anything like that. He just shut him away in a box somewhere in his mind and pretended he didn't even have a brother anymore.

Simon was just some guy he happened to grow up with who no longer deserved any thought. I remember asking if Uncle Steve had maybe forgotten the picture was there or if he kept one last picture of his brother to remember him by. Aunt Janie said that it was definitely the latter. Steve knew that picture was in that album, and it wouldn't have mattered if he was blackout drunk, he wouldn't have brought it downstairs unless for some reason he wanted us to see it. We figured it might be a cry for help or something, and all that feeling was bubbling up after all those years.

But to my knowledge, he never talked about it. I mean, maybe he did talk about it with my aunt and asked her not to broadcast what he said, but who knows? And I sure hope he did anyway, because it's not healthy to keep that kind of pain buried inside like that. Not healthy at all. This is a pretty messed up story about something that happened to me in the late 2000s. This is the first time I put it all down on paper, even though I've shared this story privately a lot, so please bear with me. In the fall of 2008, I was in my senior year of high school in a small town near Atlanta. I just turned 18 and was a typical outgoing girl, I guess.

Nothing really remarkable about me. I was just normal. I did gymnastics. I was dating a football player, not the team captain, but a solid player. and we weren't on track to be prom, king, and queen, but we were pretty popular and friendly kids. And I wasn't a beauty queen, but I was happy with how I looked. I always imagined that you had to be a really extra special to get a hyper-obsessed, dangerous stalker, and I couldn't have been more wrong.

And I guess that's why I didn't take it too seriously when it started. Friday, September 26th. That date is ingrained into my mind because I've had to repeat it so many times in retellings, reports, and that's the day it started. The day Logan Nelson added me to Myspace. I didn't recognize him, but I accepted his friend request right away. And I wasn't very picky back then, and online security was far from a concern for my stupid self.

Oh, hey, someone who wants to be your friend? So you click accept and get the thrill of number go up. Now, I knew from the outset that this Logan Nelson's profile wasn't him. It was MySpace Tom crudely photoshopped with Joker makeup. And I guess MySpace Tom has the Joker amused me, so I accepted Logan's friend request and thought nothing of it. Later, I got an alert about a post on my MySpace wall. It was from Logan. And he said something like, hey, seeing you around school.

You seem cool. And I just replied asking if we had any classes together. Now, he replied with a simple yes, which was unhelpful. So I stopped replying and went ahead with enjoy. my weekend. Saturday was the last barbecue of the year with the family and my boyfriend Kyle's fam, and the weather would be turning soon, so it'd be a time to put the grill into storage for the winter. My uncle Chris, dad's brother, famously grilled a mean steak and our barbecues would inevitably turn into large neighborhood events, with dozens of people coming and going throughout the

afternoon and evening. Towards the end of the night, when the various kids in attendance had settled down and things were a bit quieter, Kyle came up to me and asked. who Logan was. I didn't immediately remember the guy who added me to MySpace, so I asked for some context. And Kyle let me in inside and showed me a note stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. And it said, Hey, Sandy, you look great today. Good enough to eat. Logan.

Creepy. So I remembered Logan Nelson from MySpace and told Kyle about him, and we tried to work out who Logan Nelson was and if we'd seen him at the barbecue. Now, Kyle eventually figured out that Logan could be this quiet, unassuming kid who had a few classes with us. He dropped by the barbecue at some time in the evening, Kyle said. This kid, if I was thinking of the right guy, was a band geek type. Certainly didn't strike me as the type of guy to leave a smutty message on my family refrigerator. And that night, I posted on his MySpace wall asking if he'd left the message.

And his reply was, well, yeah? You like it? I didn't say yes or no, but asked if he was Logan from Kemp in Spanish. Law, yeah, came the response. Mystery solved. Strange, creepy, and annoying, but solved. Kyle and I confronted Logan the next time we had class together. Logan was absolutely baffled and said he'd never put anything on the refrigerator.

Kyle kind of got up in his face, and I swear Logan was about to piss himself. He had been at the barbecue, but swore he hadn't stolen. duck a note on the refrigerator, wasn't interested in me like that, quote unquote, and anyway, his name was Logan Baumgardner, not Logan Nelson. Kyle wasn't so sure, so I managed to talk him down, which is lucky because I think he was about ready to pound Logan Baumgartner into the dirt. And that evening, when I came from school, Dad and Uncle Chris were watching the game. I asked Dad if he'd seen anyone come into the house during the barbecue, and the house was typically out of bounds during our BBQs, except for people using the bathroom, so people went in and out

but wouldn't linger. Dad couldn't recall seeing anyone in particular, but Chris said Kyle and a couple of his buddies had been hanging around the kitchen. Obviously, Kyle hadn't seen anyone suspicious, but I called him later that night and asked if he could check with his buddies, or see if any of them recalled the note on the refrigerator to try and pinpoint exactly when it had been posted. I was beginning to feel like a crack detective, and then everything simply cracked. The next evening, Logan Nelson posted on my MySpace wall saying something about how he wanted to see my insides. Now, anyways, this was pretty clear and a concise thread, so I told my dad and Uncle Chris. Now, they were both absolutely fuming.

Uncle Chris, who at the time was working night security, offered to swing by the house regularly on his off nights and keep an eye out for anyone suspicious. No less than two days later, while me and my family were blissfully asleep, Chris reported catching an intruder peeping into my bedroom window. He'd leaped out of the car and gave chase, but this black-clad figure had apparently given him the slip while leaping through neighbor's gardens and over back fences into their yards. Chris had returned to his car and sat outside our house for the rest of the night, until we

were up and awake and he could let us know what had just happened. I didn't really understand why at the time, but we decided not to call the cops the first time. And I was told that Chris and Dad decided that it would be better if we just handled it ourselves. This didn't make me feel very safe, but they knew best. And by this point, I blocked Logan Nelson on MySpace, but I kept receiving dozens of spam requests. I'd also received random friend requests and abusive messages on every messenger program I used. And it was really starting to terrify me, this guy watching me from somewhere. What about the nights when Uncle Chris couldn't keep an eye on the house?

This guy could be outside looking in, and maybe one day he'd break in and take things further. I expressed my fear to Dad and Uncle Chris and suggested again that we just called the cops. Dad was taking my side, but Uncle Chris said that he had two weeks vacation from work and would be able to monitor the house a lot better. Now, he suggested that we could handle the guy our way, and this seemed to win Dad over. They'd always been those kind of brothers. The spam and abuse online kept coming. Different accounts every day.

Different threats to my email before I blocked each and every one. Threats of violence and worse. And it was driving me nuts and making me feel so unsafe. I begged Dad again to call the cops and he finally agreed. Unfortunately, my paranoid ass had been deleting most of the emails and messages from the stalker, but I kept the note from the refrigerator in a couple of the latest emails. Dad and I took them to the station that afternoon. The female cop I saw was really helpful and sympathetic.

Unfortunately, she explained that there wasn't much they could do with what we had, but told us to keep collecting information and evidence. They did take the note away for processing, but we'd all handled it so there really wasn't much of a chance of finding fingerprints or anything. That night, I awoke to a loud commotion in the backyard. The clock read after two in the morning, and I grabbed a robe and covered myself and then looked out. Uncle Chris was standing in the back, yelling and waving some kind of bat.

Dad and I rushed outside. Chris was out there with a neighbor hollering about an intruder. When he calmed down, he told us that he'd caught a figure in a hoodie peering through my bedroom window. He tried to sneak up on that intruder but startled him and the guy ran off again. Then the neighbor came out, saw Uncle Chris in the backyard, thought that he was an intruder, and began to threaten him. Eventually, everyone calmed down and Chris was trying to get Dad and the neighbor to go canvassing the streets with him, but in the end, they decided the guy must be long gone.

Now, the next few days were hell. The online abuse ramped up, and it seemed like no matter how many accounts I blocked, a new one would message me, and now the abuse had become more targeted, too. Very few people knew this, but in my sophomore year, I suffered from an eating disorder, and even spent a few weeks in a clinic during the summer break. I'd recovered fully, and only those closest to me knew about it, but it had been a long and hard road to get over, and at times I still felt those intrusive thoughts coming back.

And so it was pretty unwelcome when my stalkers started calling me fat, and obese, a pig, and a disgusting flesh monster, all sorts of lovely things. The dress you wore today doesn't fit you very well. Maybe try ten sizes up, they say. Didn't know that they let pigs into. or high school, saw you in the cafeteria stuffing your face today. Disgusting. I hadn't even eaten in the freaking cafeteria that day. I hadn't eaten anything because the weight paranoia was coming

back thanks to this stalker. And we filed reports with the cops about all this online abuse, but back in 2008, being an online target wasn't taken seriously at all by the law, even if the cops were sympathetic. And since we only had Uncle Chris's eyewitness account of a potential intruder, it was hard to escalate things legally. Now, Kyle tried his best to make me feel better, constantly telling me that it was beautiful and I shouldn't listen. And he knew about the eating disorder, of course, although we hadn't started dating yet when I was hospitalized for it.

Kyle's attempts weren't really working, though, and I was falling back into the rabbit hole of hating myself. Now, one morning, I found a huge cake shoved into our mailbox. Flies were swarming around it, and the entire space in the mailbox was filled with disgusting cream frosting and stale baked goods. Now, it must have been done before our mail arrived because the mailman alerted us about it.

And that same day, I received a bunch of spam emails asking if I enjoyed the cake, with things like oink-oink written in them and then photos of pigs. Uncle Chris was still on his vacation days, so he promised to up his patrols, and he said he hadn't been there the night before due to a date, which I couldn't really hold against him.

That night, though, every time I peeked out my window, I saw him sitting in his car, either reading or napping, and it did make me feel safer. But what a fool I was, as if anything, was keeping me safe. Now, it was past four this time when I was woken up by a commotion. More than a commotion, actually. A rock came hurtling through my window, smashing the glass, and sending a shard flying right past my leg and even cutting me slightly. I screamed and ran into the house.

Mom and my siblings were already cowering in the living room and dad was unlocking the gun cabinet. I completely forgotten my little sidearm in my bedroom's safe, so much for that. And dad ran outside and against my mom's wishes, I followed him. Uncle Chris was out there again and this time surrounded by a bunch of neighbors. Chris had a wild story to tell. He'd driven to the pigly-wiggly to grab some snacks and got caught up chatting to the kid working the register. Now, Uncle Chris was kind of like that. He could somehow strike up a conversation with anyone,

and so he drove back to his stakeout and caught a creeper staring into my window again. And without thinking, Uncle Chris said that he leaped out of his car, swiped up a rock, and hurled it at the intruder. He missed, of course, and that's what had smashed my window. Uncle Chris himself had actually thrown that rock. Of course, this drew the neighbors out again, and a few of the neighbor guys were scouring the area for that black-clad intruder that Uncle Chris described.

Chris was really riled up, waving his gun around as he spoke, and Dad had to take him to one side and tell him to calm down before somebody got shot. He'd already thrown a rock through my bedroom window, which Dad was pissed at him about. It was impossible for any of us to get to sleep that night, and not really worth trying as the sun would soon be up. Now, my younger siblings did go back to bed, so did my mom, but Dad, Uncle Chris, and I sat in the kitchen just drinking, coffee, and I thought they were waiting for the cops to arrive, but apparently I was wrong.

And that's when Uncle Chris dropped a bombshell. He said that he couldn't be sure. He stressed this over and over again, but he wanted to tell me just in case. He said that when he threw the rock, that peeping Tom had turned and his mask had slipped, and Chris had gotten a glimpse of a face that he was sure was Kyle. My boyfriend, Kyle. Kyle, my boyfriend, my stalker? Could it be B? No, I thought about it. None of the online abuse had come through exactly when I was with Kyle, and the note had been left on the refrigerator when Kyle was in and out of the house. Kyle knew about my eating disorder. But why? Why would Kyle, the guy I loved, do this to me? No, Uncle Chris had to be wrong. Kyle wouldn't have the time or energy to make all these fake accounts,

do all this harassment, shove a cake into my mailbox. Uncle Chris could have seen any white, normal-looking teenage boy and jump to conclusions. And Kyle wouldn't do this to me. I mean, he wouldn't, would he? Now, I didn't want to raise the issue with Kyle. I was still very insecure and I was worried that even asking him about it might cause him to break up with me. It's dumb, I know, and Kyle must have been able to tell that I was distant with him, though, because he asked what was up between us when he called me on Friday night.

And I just broke down and told him how bad it was, feeling because of the stalker, how insecure and scared that I was. And I mentioned that I felt so unsafe at school, knowing that this guy was watching me from somewhere at every turn, and wanted to try to fish for any clues that Kyle might feel guilty. And that's when Kyle pointed out something interesting. He said something like, well, the stalker hasn't actually done anything at school, right? And when I thought about it, he was right. All the harassment had taken place in and around my home, and I'd never received

any anonymous notes in my locker, nothing slipped into my coat or bagged during school, and the stalker had left a note in my home, filled the mailbox with cake, and been caught lurking around my bedroom window by Uncle Chris a couple of times. There's no actual proof he goes to school with us, Kyle had said. And then I thought about the messages. They would be sent to my email, my MySpace profile, Friendster, etc, and I never really paid attention to when they were posted just when I received them, which was after I returned home from school. I've been saving them for the police reports, so I went back and checked while on the phone with Kyle,

and the messages that were timed or dated had all been posted at random times throughout the day, although never mid-morning. Whoever it was knew certain details, though, like what I'd worn to school some days. And then Kyle reminded me about other details that were wrong, like the time the stalker had given me crap for stuffing my face in the cafeteria

when I hadn't even eaten. my lunch in the cafeteria that day. And this revelation didn't make things better, though. If anything, it just widened the pool of suspects to an almost impossible size. Now, this really caused me to start panicking, and I broke down on the phone and started crying and hyperventilating. Kyle insisted that he was coming over there and then, and we lived across town, and it was nearly midnight, so I told him not to, but he was insistent. He wanted to check on me, so I hung up the phone and waited for him. And feeling good that I had a lot of boyfriend who dropped everything on a Friday night to come and see me.

I was checking my messages that night, hoping that something would come through while Kyle was on the drive over, proving that he wasn't the one sending the abuse. Now, by this point, I was pretty certain he wasn't, but the confirmation would have been nice. I got the confirmation that night, but not the way that I could have ever, ever expected. I was reading, I think, when the commotion sounded from outside. This was beginning to become a routine now, yelling, shouting, and then a crash. I rushed to the window. Kyle was struggling with someone on the lawn.

They were both rolling around out there, and neighbors were already beginning to emerge. I saw Dad step onto our lawn holding his shotgun. I ran outside. Dad had his shotgun trained on these two men, Kyle and Uncle Chris. Kyle had his hands held behind his head while Chris was shouting and ranting. Shut up, Dad screamed at him. I was shocked to see this gun swing in Chris's direction, and I was even more shocked to hear what Kyle was saying.

Kyle had pulled up around the corner outside of our cul-de-sac and walked around the block of my house to avoid waking my family. By now it was nearly one in the morning. As he'd approached around the back, where my room looked out over, he'd seen a figure standing in my window. It was very clear from his motions that the guy was pleasuring himself. Kyle had yelled and then tackled him and started beating on the guy. And that's when he realized it was Uncle Chris.

Now Uncle Chris denied this, and of course he hadn't been touching himself. He'd just been on his patrol like usual, keeping me safe. No, this could have been believed except Dad's eyes traveled down to Chris's crotch. His fly was clearly undone and his clothing was very disheveled. And when Uncle Chris saw where Dad had been looking, his face went as well. white as a goddamn sheet. It had always been Uncle Chris leading this narrative, and it had been Uncle Chris who had been caught in the backyard by the neighbor that first time, and come up with some story about how he'd been chasing a mysterious third party. It had been Uncle Chris who

threw the rock at my window, claiming that there was an intruder. It had been Uncle Chris who had repeatedly persuaded us to keep the cops' involvement to a minimum so we could handle it ourselves. Uncle Chris, who was at our house either most mornings or most evenings, who would know what I was wearing to school, who would have time in the day to send various abusive messages. Uncle Chris, who could easily have slipped into the house during the barbecue and left the note on that refrigerator. Uncle Chris, who was able to shove cake into the mailbox because he was the one keeping the house safe, quote unquote, in the first place.

Uncle Chris knew all about my eating disorder, my insecurities, my weaknesses, my weaknesses, and fears. Uncle Chris, my dad's flesh and blood brother, who'd been a beloved presence in my life since I was born, stalking me, harassing me, fantasizing about me, and that trauma still exists for me 16 years later. Now, I'll summarize everything briefly as we did get the cops involved, but the online stalking charges didn't amount to much back then, and it was Kyle's word against Chris that he'd been purving on me through the window. Ultimately, there wasn't much that we could achieve with the law. Why did Chris do all of this? It turned out that he'd always incredibly hated my dad for marrying my mom. Chris was the older brother and had secretly harbored a thing for my mom,

and I don't know the extent of it, and I don't want to know, but he came clean about a bunch of small yet spiteful acts that he'd committed against my dad and our family over the years. Accidents that weren't really accidents, damage around the house that happened mysteriously, neighborhood kids keying dad's car, all sorts of amounts of small yet terrifying incidents, and then apparently when I hit 18, I quote unquote blossomed into looking too close to mom, and that made him hate me too, as well as apparently, well, yeah. So he decided to hurt our whole family in one evil go. And after all this came out, we'd never seen Chris again.

Dad had passed away 10 years later, and mom just, a couple of years ago. My two siblings were doing well as they both lived overseas and haven't heard from Chris. As for me, the event destroyed my trust and my life. And Kyle and I didn't stay together for much longer after that because I simply couldn't bring myself to trust anyone close to me at all. Chris had been like a second father figure to me and to say that I took all this hard would be an understatement. It was devastating. There's no happy ending. It just makes me sad that Dad never lived to see Chris put in the ground. That's happened now, though. And apparently he listed me as his closest living relative, because a few weeks ago, I was informed that Chris had died in a motorcycle

accident a few states over. Apparently, he was strung out on meth and showed signs of long-term addiction. I don't think I'll have any more involvement than being informed, but I'm glad to know that he's gone, and I hope it was painful. I have moved on, and I have a partner and family of my own, and I'm just very grateful that my kids can't grow up with a terrifying paternal uncle because my husband is an only child. About 10 years ago now, my dad passed away. He died of natural causes, but it was so sudden that it hit us really hard. And then maybe a month or so after all the funeral and inheritance stuff, I got asked if I wanted a few boxes of his things. My mom and dad divorced when me and my little sister were kids, and he lived on the other side of the state, so we only ever saw him on weekends,

and only ever if he was free. He was a big workaholic and didn't have much time for us growing up, so when it came time to divide up the boxes of his stuff, she told me that I was welcome to all three. I took delivery of the three cardboard boxes a couple of days later, and then for about a week they sat untouched in my living room. Now, opening them meant accepting that he was gone and that he was never coming back. And while that might sound kind of obvious since I already attended his funeral

and received my inheritance, I guess that's just where I was at emotionally. I took a couple of days before I finally summoned up the courage to cut the tape and open up the boxes, and when I did, it was just as emotional as I imagined it would be. All the stuff from his childhood, seeing how similar we were growing up, it really gave me this concrete sense of who I was and where I'd come from. There were all kinds of baseball cards, old photos of my dad and my aunt as kids, and then Old Fender Stratocaster, still in its case, which had to be worth thousands of dollars by this point.

And there was a really nice shirt, too, one from an expensive tailor in New York. And then finally, there was the laptop case. And by the look of things, it had to be from the mid-90s at the very least, but then large sections of it were made from what appeared to be real leather, and it was actually really well designed in terms of all the extra storage and how ergonomic it was. I decided to get it refurbished, if that's even the right word for stuff like that,

and then I could use it for my laptop for folders and files, and it looked damn good holding them too. But first, I needed to make sure all the little pockets and pouches were empty. There was some receipts in one pouch, some old Italian lira in another, which is the money they used to use before euros, and then in another pouch I found an envelope. But the name written on it wasn't my dad's, wasn't even really. a name at all. It just said, honey. And at first I figured it was a letter from my mom, one from before

the divorce when they were still in their honeymoon period. Now, I thought it might make for a nice read, you know, something to remind me that they were actually in love once. But then when I opened the envelope, I saw some pictures inside it too, nude pictures. And having already retrieved the handwritten letter and assuming the photos were of my mom, I dropped the envelope with a photo still inside like it was radioactive. Now, I was kind of put off reading the letter too, because if there were nude pictures in the envelope, then I'd most likely be grossed out to all hell by its contents. But I figured as soon as it got spicy, I'd just tap out and then burn the envelope's contents, because God knows that I didn't want anyone get in their hands on those pictures.

Now, anyway, I started reading the letter, and right away, I'm feeling suspicious, because it's not my mom's handwriting. I was suspicious, not overly so, because, and cool story, people's handwriting actually changes over time due to things like health, experience, mood, and intentional practice. I did a whole semester on neurological stuff like that in college, so with that in mind, I didn't immediately think, this isn't a letter from my mom. Another reason it didn't occur to me that it wasn't her letter was the date. It was dated at a time when they were still married, but then as I read the letter's contents, none of it made any sense. I talked about places my dad and the author had been, but to my knowledge, mom and dad had never been to California together.

And if they had, I was pretty sure that they'd have mentioned it in passing at some point, not just kept it a secret. And like I said, I got maybe halfway through the letter before I sort of said, okay, this is definitely not mom, because the author was calling my dad all these pet names that were not the same ones used by my mother. Now, I remember picking up the envelope and rolling the dice by taking a look at the pictures. Then, lo and behold, the naked lady in them was definitely not my mom, meaning only one thing. My dad, prior to the divorce, had been cheating on my mom with a lady that he met at work. And if my suspicions were correct, that was what led to the divorce, not the irreconcilable differences they cited in the divorce papers. And the only thing that I didn't understand was why my mom would keep it.

bit a big secret. She wasn't exactly dad's biggest fan after the divorce, and she really didn't hold back from talking trash about him. But if that was the case, and assuming that she knew about it, then why didn't she mention the affair? The only explanation was either she wanted to protect us from the truth, which seemed very unlikely, or she genuinely didn't know my dad had an affair. If that was the case, and call me selfish or whatever you want, but I did not want to be the one to tell her. They say ignorance is bliss, and I can tell you from experience just how true that really is. So while I understand people thinking I should have told her, I chose not to. What I chose to do instead was use Google to try and dig up any information on her I could find.

The lady signed off her love letter with a shortened version of a fairly common girl's name, so I tried plugging that name, along with a company my dad used to work at into the search bar, and then tried adding specific fields like accounting or human resources and actually got a couple of hits. But there weren't many company pages in my results. They were just sort of news articles, details how a lady who had worked at the same company as my dad had gone missing during the early 90s. Now, I didn't know the lady's second name, so I couldn't be 100% sure that she was the same one my dad had the affair with. But after finding an article which had a picture of her, it was no longer any doubt. The lady who went missing in the 90s was the same one in those nudie pictures.

I had to know more, and so I called Mom with what I knew was a very strange request. I wanted to ask her something about Dad, but she wasn't allowed to ask any follow-up questions, not until I was sure of something. Luckily, she wasn't interested in hearing anything I discovered, so I got a flightly in that respect, and so I asked her my question. I wanted to know what was going on with her and Dad around the time his observation. affair partner went missing. Now, I didn't say anything about the affair. I just told her the Dayton question and then asked if she could remember anything unusual happening with him around that time.

And at first, she basically said, you're asking me for details from more than 20 years ago. I can barely remember what happened last week. And I asked her to think on it for me, and then call me back if she remembered anything. She said okay, and then a couple of days later, she gave me a call. Now for a woman that had once said that she didn't want to know anything I'd found out, mom seemed really focused on asking me why I asked her that question. I reiterated that I didn't want to tell her until I knew more about the situation because at that stage, it amounted to nothing but speculation. I didn't want to worry or frighten anyone because when all was said and done, the situation might not be as bad as I feared. She reluctantly accepted, just as long as I promised to tell her when the case was closed,

so to speak. After racking her brain about it, mom began to claw back some memory of the period in question. She remembered how dad was working a lot and how something on his job seemed to be getting him down. He seemed to get more and more stressed about it, losing sleep and not eating properly, and then one day he announced that he was headed for an impromptu hiking vacation to de-stress. Mom said he wasn't much of a hiker, and it had been organized as a team-building-stress exercising exercise by the company, so he pretty much had to attend. He seemed happy about it, as much as he could be, given the status of his mind, and that he was gone for about three

or four days before he came home again. Mom said that she thought that he'd show signs of improvement on his return, but apparently, dad was worse than ever. He slept for like an entire day after he got home, seemed moody and distant for a few days, and then only basically got back to his regular self after weeks of supposedly taking it easy at work. My mom said that since she'd been thinking about it, she realized that that was the beginning of the end of their marriage. Dad was never the same again, and she filed for divorce just over a year later after trying to work things out with him. She said that she was very interested to know what I'd found, which, again, stood in stark contrast to how she'd acted a few days before.

And then when I asked her if she was sure, really sure, she said yes. Before asking in a very concerned voice, what the heck have you found? I told her add a few more loose ends to tie up, but then I'd give her the full breakdown of what I'd found. But I warned her it'd be upsetting at best and terrifying at worst. Now she sounded just as scared as I was when she said okay, and then after we'd hung up, I put together a little plan of action for the following morning. I was going to call the cops, tell them I had some information regarding a missing person's case from the early 90s, and then hand over the love letter connecting the missing lady to my dad.

I told them all about what my mom had said, too, how dad had been acting weird around the time the lady disappeared. But I don't think that helped much. They needed hard evidence, not the anecdotal kind. It was probably the single most surreal, heartbreaking, and depressing thing I've ever done, report my own father for potentially being a murderer. But if it had helped solve this poor lady's case, who probably had family out there hoping she was alive, then I kind of had to, didn't I?

It didn't come to anything, like my dad was never announced as a suspect or anything like that, and aside from the report I gave, the cop only called back once to confirm a few details that weren't in my statement and then never called again. That part was easy, but telling my mom about the affair and how the lady had gone missing while dad was acting weird, that part was anything but.

It was one thing to find out that he'd been cheating on her, but considering the possibility he'd been involved in this lady's disappearance was another thing entirely, and I watched her sink into this pit of depression for a while. It didn't matter if he was involved in her disappearance. It was having this whole secret life that she didn't know about, grieving some lover that she'd lost in secret, and that was the best case scenario because, in the worst, she'd been sharing her bed with a goddamn murderer for like a year after.

And now I just live with this all in my head. It doesn't even mean that dad didn't murder that girl yet. It just means the cops haven't been able to prove it conclusively, and that's my biggest fear. That one day, I'll get a call saying that I helped solve the murder, that my own damned father committed and kept secret. This is probably the worst thing that's ever happened to me in terms of disgust and dread. And even worse, it's something that continues to affect my family to this day. A while back, I started on the road of fulfilling my dream of opening up a daycare center. I don't want to say what state I'm in exactly, but the background checks and regulations are like very, very strict.

I'm not complaining too much about that because they should be if a person is trying to work with kids. but I had to wait months and months filling out all kinds of forms and sending over all kinds of information, and part of the overall process was making sure that there were no child predators living in the area that I wanted to open my daycare. There's a website that you can use to find out where they live, and I do not recommend to use it, because holy crap, it is creepy to see just how many there are. But that's what I used to cross-reference potential sites to make sure that it wouldn't be near someone dangerous. It literally tells you these dudes' names and little info bubbles near their homes, and I remember clicking on a couple, still cringing about how many there were.

And then after clicking on one of the little icons, I saw a guy who had the exact same last name as me. Again, I don't want to say what that name is, so I'm not trying to docks myself, and even if I didn't give a damn, I don't want people finding my family, you know. But my point is, it's not Smith or Johnson or whatever, something common. It's actually very uncommon, and I didn't recognize the guy's first name, so I was obviously very relieved, too. But since I couldn't reassure myself that he wasn't family because of the rarity of our name, I called my uncle to ask him if I had a relative that I didn't know about. And the second I asked him, he then says, who told you?

And when I said that no one had said anything to me, he then told me that he'd come over to talk about it in person. It turns out this offender guy was a relative of ours, and the family had agreed to cut him off after the conviction, which by that point was almost three decades old, and he's already been released from prison. But after his explanation, it was time for my own because he wanted to know how the heck I'd found out after all the older generation agreed the younger should never find out. And I told him about the whole daycare thing and how I needed to look up child predators. But when I mentioned where he lived, my uncle got very mad. Apparently, they told him that he had to leave the state because they didn't want him to darken their name anymore than he already had. My uncle said that they made sure he moved away, but apparently he snuck back at some point

and had been living a few counties over from us in secret. He asked what I was planning on doing about that daycare, and I told him I'd obviously have to find a different site. Our scumbag family member was the only one in the surrounding. area, but with a daycare center, one is too many. But then right as I said that part, my uncle then responds, no, no, no, no, no. You keep your daycare where it is. Me and your uncles will handle it. I asked what he meant by handle it, and he told me not to worry, that within a week, I'd be able to hand in my completed daycare application without any child predators living in that

area. Now, I had a lot of uncles growing up, and it was very much a case of them not always being my uncles. So when the uncle I spoke to said he was going to gather a bunch of them up so that they could handle the situation, I was so naive that I didn't hear that for what it was. When he called to say they'd handled it, my uncle added that I should probably wait a month or two before filing my application, because they'd need to update the predator database to show that he didn't live there anymore. But before I could do that, I happened to catch a very brief news story on an offender that had gone missing a few counties over in almost the exact place I wanted to open my daycare. And then when they said the guy's name, I realized it was him. Our scumbag relative hadn't moved.

He disappeared. I asked my uncle what had happened, what they did to make him disappear like that, but all my uncle would say is that they scared him so bad that he just up and vanished out of state. He'd show up against some time and some far off place, just not anywhere near us. But sometimes I start to doubt that he was telling me the truth, and there's a little part of me that thinks that they probably did something way worse than just talk to him. He wasn't just an offender. He was a legit child predator, and although I never personally checked, he apparently had convictions for a bunch of different stuff like that. And so one of the darkest parts of this whole thing is that if my uncles did choose to take him out, I can't even say he doesn't deserve it. I got to open my daycare, and to this day I'm still living my dream and serving the community,

and while I've never told another living soul about what my family had to do to make sure I could open it, I can't keep it on my chest for any longer. Hey friends, thanks for listening. Don't forget to hit that follow button to be alerted of our weekly episodes every Tuesday at 1 p.m. EST. And if you haven't already, check out Let's Read on YouTube, where you can catch all my new video releases every Monday and 3rd. Thursday at 9 p.m. EST. Thanks so much, friends, and I'll see you in the next episode.