Long story short, I wound up doing it. Terry had given me a car for my birthday the year before, and I gave that to them. Made up a story to him about going to visit my sister and the car getting stolen while I was actually away at the clinic. In exchange, they gave me what they called their “higher education and culture package”. Two weeks later, we were at a family dinner and I was the one doing the apologizing and telling them that we could talk about something they knew more about.

It was wonderful.

A few days later, the man I’d first met from the clinic, Mr. Aller, contacted me. He said there had been problems with the trade. That the service I had received was actually far more expensive than the worth of the car. Instead of being worth $75,000.00, it was actually worth $3.2 million.

I didn’t have any way of paying it. Even Terry would have had trouble paying it without tons of questions from his family, as almost everything he had was controlled by the trust. And I wasn’t going to involve him or them in it anyway. I wasn’t going to prove his family right by asking for money like that.

So I argued with Aller. Told him it wasn’t my mistake, a deal was a deal, and he could fuck right off. He told me that I had a month to reconsider and either pay the money, or recruit someone else to take the treatment. I said sure thing and shut the door in his face. Tried to forget about it, figuring he was full of shit.

A month later they came for me. I don’t remember much about it, but when it was done, I was sitting outside our house on the driveway. It was early morning and it was cold, but I barely noticed. I was too busy thinking about the two years I had spent trapped in a basement being tortured when I was a teenager.

The funny thing is, there’s some part of you that knows it’s not true, right? Especially that first bad memory. They alter it a little, make everything seem a little off. In that first bad one, everything was red. Like a camera with a red filter on it or something. They do it on purpose. Call it a “tint marker”. A way of letting you know it’s something they added. And a way of making you understand that it doesn’t matter if you know they put it in you, it still hurts.