“Reality is the only word in the English language that should always be used in quotes.”-Unknown.

This is not a tour. This is no road trip, nor any other sort of preferable expedition. No atlas games. No souvenirs. Though, there was something to be relished as I sped across the country with the whisper of focused thought as my radio, echoing in the hallways of my once-scattered mind.

Her bound hands as my confirmation of what was at stake.

This was no dream. No ethereal visit from the land of incomparable reality. This was my reality as it was, bound and personified. Impossible yet actual.

My head ached at night—especially on the road—and there was no medication besides answers and optimistic conclusions that could cure it. I tried anyway, popping pills dangerously. Chasing them down with bottled coffee and more pills. It was incredible that I could manage the driving at all.

But then there were those hands.

The months after Ashley abducted my niece were nearly impossible. I spent most days in my childhood room listening to muffled conversations and percolating coffee. My brother rented out his house and moved back in as well. He was an absolute wreck of a once-imperishable man. It was the strangest of circumstances that finally brought us all together again—damaged, scarred versions of our younger selves in a house that had at one time promised us safety and comfort.

I’ll never forgive her for those months.

I’ll never forgive her at all.

“How much further before we stop for the night?” she asks, staring out through the cloudy, dirt-specked window.

“I don’t know.”

We were of few words, Kyla and I. What was there to say, really? She was a hostage. I kidnapped her, just as her sister had kidnapped my niece, but the acts were beyond comparable. Kyla was far from innocence and I was far from feeling parental as I listened to the sounds of fabric rubbing as she adjusted her wrists behind her back.

It wasn’t about her, of course. It was about the knowledge she had, the job she had agreed to do, the orders she was given, the conversations she had heard and been apart of with despite her new-found guilt. She was in contact with Ashley. If I had Kyla, I was a million steps further than I could be alone. If Ashley had something of my brother’s, then certainly it was only fair I had something of hers as well.

“This rope still hurts.”

“Where is Ashley?”

“I can’t say…you know I can’t.”

“Then I imagine you’ll grow used to the rope.”

And I worried. Yes, I worried at the reflection I saw in hotel mirrors. I was worried that I no longer knew myself. I was worried that if I changed…if I became damaged by their cruelty, I had lost more than my niece. I had lost myself. But there wasn’t enough time in the day, enough hours on the road, enough hostages to take for this to be about me. This was about Madeline. This was about Ashley. And the ties wrapped around a brunette’s wrists as she struggled beneath the roof of my car—it symbolically linked them both.