Dr. Patel called me that evening.
“I saw the news,” she said softly. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I said honestly. “But… I will be.”
Dr. Patel paused.
“In eighteen years of medicine,” she said, “I’ve only recognized a patient from a wanted bulletin twice. Once was routine—unpaid parking tickets. But Maya Brennan… she scared me even then. Something about her eyes.”
“You saved my life,” I said.
“I did my job,” she replied. Then her voice gentled. “Daniel… I don’t normally do this, but if you need someone to talk to professionally, I know an excellent therapist. Dr. Richard Moss. He specializes in trauma and identity-related psychological damage.”
I let out a humorless laugh. “You think I need therapy.”
“I think,” Dr. Patel said, “you just found out your entire relationship was built on a lie. Yes, I think you need therapy.”
She was right.
I started seeing Dr. Moss the following week.
The first session, I didn’t even know what to say. I sat in a comfortable chair with my hands locked together and stared at a framed photo of a lake on the wall like it might teach me how to speak.
Dr. Moss didn’t rush me. He asked simple questions.
“When did you first notice change?”
“What do you feel when you think about her now?”
“What do you blame yourself for?”
That last one hit hardest.
Because I blamed myself for being fooled, even though logically I knew it wasn’t fair.
Dr. Moss said something early on that stuck:
“People think the victim’s job is to be suspicious. It isn’t. The liar’s job is to lie well. That’s why it works.”
Week by week, therapy peeled back layers.
I realized I wasn’t just grieving a person.
I was grieving an entire imagined future—kids, vacations, normal boring life stuff.
I was grieving the version of myself who believed he was safe.
I was grieving my own judgment.
And underneath all that grief was fear.
Not fear of Maya now—she was locked up.
Fear that I couldn’t trust my own reality.
Fear that my instincts were broken.
Dr. Moss worked on that.
He taught me grounding techniques, sleep strategies, ways to stop spiraling when my mind replayed old moments and tried to rewrite them into warnings I “should’ve seen.”
Sometimes it helped.
Sometimes it didn’t.
Healing is slow.
Especially when your brain keeps checking doors you didn’t know were open.
7
Six months after Maya’s sentencing, I was finally ready to move.
I packed up the apartment—donated most of her things, trashed what felt unsafe to keep, boxed up what was mine. Friends offered to help, but I couldn’t stand the idea of someone else touching the life that had been contaminated.
I bought a condo downtown Chicago.
New walls. New locks.
A place without her ghost in it.
For a while, it helped.
Then, one afternoon while unpacking, I found something wedged in the back of the nightstand drawer I’d accidentally brought with me.
A burner phone.
I stared at it for a long time before turning it on.
Three contacts:
Emergency 1.
Emergency 2.
Emergency 3.
No names. Just numbers.
The call history showed she’d called Emergency 2 six times in the two weeks before urgent care. The last call was the day before.
My stomach tightened.
I called Detective Ramirez.
When she heard “burner phone,” her voice sharpened.
“She had a network,” Ramirez said. “We suspected but couldn’t prove. Those numbers could lead to other fugitives, other stolen identities.”
They traced the numbers.
Two were dead ends.
The third led to a woman in Portland named Lisa Morgan.
But the real Lisa Morgan had died in 2019.
The woman using her name was wanted for embezzlement in Texas.
The FBI picked her up three days later.
Ramirez called me with the update.
“You helped us find someone who’d been missing for four years,” she said. “That counts for something.”
“It doesn’t bring back two years,” I said quietly.
“No,” Ramirez agreed. “But it might save someone else from losing theirs.”
I sat in my condo after that call and let the weight settle.
Some part of me expected closure to feel warm.
Instead, it felt like a deep exhale—thin, shaky, but real.
8
See more on the next page
Advertisement
<
See more on the next page
Advertisement
