Chapter 3 Chosen Family
Over the years, Amy and I never stopped hunting the traffickers.
Two years ago, the hunt finally paid off.
Amy found one of them.
The man from the first place, the one who owned the house where I’d been kept for the first two years.
We sent an anonymous tip to the police, and five girls were rescued. Some were younger than I had been, some older, all of them broken in their own ways, but all of them alive.
Every one of them was offered immediate help and long-term support through the women’s shelter I funded. Housing. Therapy. Legal aid. Whatever they needed to start rebuilding their life.
The man, Antonio, was arrested on multiple charges. Human trafficking. Unlawful imprisonment. Assault. Organized crime. Several others were taken in with him. His network had been smaller than we once believed, but no less brutal.
When Amy showed me the police report, I stared at it for a long time. The photos of the house. The rooms I recognized. I could almost smell the place again. Dust. Sweat. Fear.
Late that night, alone in my apartment, I opened his mugshot and finally cried.
Not for myself, but for the version of me who hadn’t made it out in that life, and for the girls who now would.
The first trafficking ring was dismantled. But the second one still existed. The place where I died.
We still hadn’t found it, and the not-knowing haunted me. I knew there were girls inside. I knew time was passing for them the way it once passed for me. And I had no idea how to reach them.
I didn’t know the city. I didn’t know the building. I only remembered dark rooms, heavy air, locked doors, and the feeling that I had been moved across borders. That place was a ghost.
But I wasn’t giving up. Not ever. We kept searching, because even if I couldn’t save myself in that life, I would make damn sure I saved someone else in this one. And until that second door was kicked in too, until that last place was found, I would not stop looking.
Amy was the one constant in all of it. The one person who never stepped back. Four months ago, she moved to Chicago for me. I never asked her to uproot her life, but she did, claiming she needed to “make sure I didn’t do anything stupid.”
Amy didn’t have many friends. Not because she couldn’t.
Because she didn’t want to. Amy was neurodivergent in the quiet ways.
She read social cues differently. Felt conversations heavier.
Processed emotions slower but deeper. Crowds drained her.
Small talk bored her. People often mistook her silence for coldness.
She could disappear into her computer for hours, hyper-fixated on a problem, a line of code, a pattern only she could see.
She had chosen me years ago and never felt the need to replace that choice.
We were similar in that way. I wasn’t the life of the party either. People exhausted me. I just hid it better.
So when I moved, she followed.
She rented a modest apartment in Des Plaines, about thirty minutes from my place in River North. I helped her carry boxes upstairs, both of us sweating in the late-afternoon heat.
“You could’ve picked closer to downtown,” I said, shifting a box against my hip. “I know you have the money from all your hacking jobs.”
She shook her head. “Too many sounds. Too many people.”
That was Amy in a sentence.
Liam, her older brother, moved to Chicago too.
Not because he loved the city—he didn’t.
He didn’t even like it. He moved because he didn’t trust it.
Crime statistics, news headlines, stories from fellow officers…
he hated the idea of Amy living alone in a place this big.
Amy functioned brilliantly, but she didn’t ask for help.
Didn’t notice danger until it was already too close.
So he requested a transfer to the Chicago Police Department, North Side patrol, and took a small apartment near hers. Close enough to respond. Far enough to give her space.
We had a small housewarming party for him. Just Amy, me, takeout boxes, and mismatched chairs in his new living room. The kind of night that felt ordinary on the surface but carried the quiet weight of people choosing each other, again and again.
When Liam moved, he broke up with his girlfriend.
“She didn’t want to move,” he told me when I asked. “She wanted suburbs, routine, predictability. I wanted my sister safe.”
“You okay with that?” I asked.
He shrugged, the kind of shrug that came from a place of certainty rather than indifference. “We weren’t forever.”
There was no bitterness in his voice. Just acceptance, a man who knew exactly what he valued and didn’t apologize for it.
Halfway through the evening, with takeout containers pushed to one side and the three of us sitting in mismatched chairs, he looked at us with a seriousness that cut through the easy quiet.
“You two need to learn self-defense.”
Amy groaned immediately. “I’m learning survival through avoidance.”
He didn’t smile.
“I’ve seen too much,” he said quietly. “Every shift. Every week. The world is not safe. Especially for women.”
I didn’t argue.
“I feel responsible for both of you,” he went on. “You’re under my wing whether you like it or not.”
Amy crossed her arms. “I can run simulations of danger.”
“That won’t help when someone grabs you.”
She shot him a glare sharp enough to cut glass.
“I’m not sending you to some group class with strangers,” he said. “I rented a room at a local gym. I’ll teach you myself. Once a week. One on one.”
“You?”
“I’ve trained officers. And civilians.”
Amy sighed dramatically. “I hate sweat.”
“You hate hospitals more,” he replied, deadpan.
She glared again.
I couldn’t help smiling.
There was something grounding about the two of them, the easy bickering, the unspoken loyalty. Their big-brother-little-sister rhythm was so natural, so steady, so unlike the brittle, competitive environment I’d grown up with. Watching them felt like stepping into a family I’d never had.
“I’m in.” I had too many enemies in this life to pretend I didn’t need to know how to defend myself.
Liam nodded, satisfied.
Amy looked at me like I’d personally betrayed her.
“Fine,” she muttered. “But if I die during training, I’m haunting both of you.”
“You’ll survive,” I said.
“Barely,” she complained.
But she still showed up.
We learned how to fall. How to break grips. How to use weight against strength. How to survive long enough to run. Liam watched us like a hawk, like he already knew that one day, one of us would need everything he was teaching.