My mother made us compete for who got to eat dinner each night. When my brother’s heart stopped, the doctors found my mother’s feeding logs.

My mother made us compete for who got to eat dinner each night. When my brother’s heart stopped, doctors found her feeding logs. Only one child could win. Losers watch the winner eat while their stomachs cramped.

“Competition breeds excellence,” Mom would say. “The weak deserve to starve.” Rules change nightly. Monday, math problems. Tuesday, wall sits. Wednesday, who could withstand her verbal attacks without crying? Winner got full plate. Second place, bread and water. Everyone else, nothing.

Dad ate his full meal while judging us. Sometimes tossed bread pieces. “Good effort.” We’d scramble for scraps like dogs. My older brother, Gino, memorized Mom’s patterns. Won most nights. Elena hid peanut butter in her room. When Mom found it, 5 days, no competition rights. Automatic last place.

Elena passed out day three. Mom stepped over her unconscious body.

“Valuable lesson about dishonesty.”

Tommy was eight when he stopped growing. At the pediatrician, Mom showed her leather notebook.

“Such a picky eater. See? Tuesday. Chicken nuggets, green beans. Tell about your vegetables, Tommy,” she coached, squeezing his shoulder.

He recited through hollow eyes. “I like carrots. Mom makes good broccoli.”

The doctor seemed satisfied. That notebook was elaborate lies. Tommy hadn’t seen vegetables in months.

Competitions escalated. Endurance challenges. Staying awake for days. Pain challenges, holding hands over candles. I have the scar from winning after 45 seconds. Worst were loyalty tests. We had to hurt each other. I broke Tommy’s finger for dinner after 4 days without eating. The snap echoed.

Mom smiled. “That’s competitive spirit.”

I ate while my 8-year-old brother sobbed.

Chronic hunger rewires your brain. Food becomes everything. You’d betray anyone to eat. School noticed our thin frames. Inability to concentrate. Found Elena crying in cafeteria, eating abandoned sandwich crusts from garbage. Mom pulled us out, started homeschooling. Too many nosy people.

Isolation made everything worse. No school lunches, no friends, just nightly competitions determining survival.

Gino cracked at 17. Six feet of bone and desperation. After losing three competitions, he lunged for Mom’s plate. Dad swung a chair into Gino’s skull. The crack was deafening.

Mom waited for him to wake. “You forfeited competing rights permanently. You watch but never eat.”

“How do I survive?”

“Your problem.”

Seven days later, Gino’s room was empty. Window open. Mom reported him as runaway. Police gave up. Case closed.

Three months later, Elena whispered, “I found Gino.” He was on the streets at 19, selling himself for food money. Didn’t recognize her.

Elena bought a hidden camera with blood plasma money. Three months recording competitions. Starvation. Tommy’s deterioration. Mom saying, “Weak deserve to starve.” Camera in stuffed bear uploading to cloud nightly.

Elena tried escaping with backup drive. Mom was waiting. Mom watched the footage. Expected rage. Instead, she smiled.

“Clever. But who will believe this? I’ll say it’s staged.”

She closed the laptop.

“But you need punishing. Family meeting. Elena betrayed us. Special month-long competition. Only one eats. Other two get water. Natural selection.”

Tommy lasted 4 days before his heart started failing. Found him on bathroom floor. Forty-eight pounds at 11. I picked him up, weighed nothing, and ran. Ran to neighbors. They called 911, ambulance, police, child services.

Mom had explanations ready. Troubled children with eating disorders. But they found Elena’s bear. Camera inside. Cloud backup. Three months of evidence.

Trial lasted 3 weeks. Mom’s lawyer argued alternative parenting. Prosecutor showed Tommy’s records. Permanent growth stunting. Organ damage. Would never develop normally. Jury deliberated 2 hours.

Mom got 15 years. Dad got 10. We were separated into different foster homes. Couldn’t stop competing. Programming too deep.

Tommy’s in residential treatment. Fed through tubes. Can’t handle eating normally. Freezes at plates. Waiting for competition announcement.

Elena’s in therapy for PTSD. Still weighs herself obsessively.

Gino is gone. Street swallowed him.

I work at food bank now. Surrounded by everything I once would have killed for.

Mom sends monthly letters from prison. Never opened them. They sit in shoe box.

Last week everything changed. Victim’s advocate called.

“Your mother’s being considered for early release. Good behavior. Within the year.”

Couldn’t breathe. Eight years and she walks free.

“There’s more. She made statements about Gino. About what really happened when he disappeared.”

“What statements?”

“Claims he didn’t run away. Says she knows exactly where he is. Will only tell you in person when released.”

Hung up. Sat in darkness 3 hours. Went to closet. Pulled out shoe box. Opened first letter in eight years.

First line: “My dearest son, you were always my favorite competitor. When I get out, we need to discuss Gino, where I buried the real reason he disappeared. The game I never told anyone we were playing.”

Dropped it like fire. Thirty-seven more envelopes. Open six so far. Each worse, each hinting at something bigger than starvation games. Something Mom planned before we were born.

Seventh letter had a map. Hand-drawn. Our old backyard. X marked near the oak tree where Gino learned the final rule.

Eighth letter: “Did you think the competitions were about food? Food was just a tool. The real experiment was much more elegant.”

Ninth letter: “Gino figured it out. That’s why he had to go.”

Called the advocate back.

“I need to visit her.”

“Are you sure?”

“She knows where Gino is.”

“The police can handle—”

“No. She’ll only tell me. And I need to know what game we were really playing.”

Visit scheduled for tomorrow.

Tonight, I dug through Gino’s old room. Found his journal under loose floorboard. Last entry. Night before he ran away.

“Mom’s not our real mother. Found adoption papers. All four of us, different families. She collected us. This isn’t about food. It’s about something else. Something in our DNA. I confronted her and—”

Entry ends mid-sentence.

I sit at my kitchen table at 3:00 in the morning. Gino’s journal open in front of me. The last entry ending mid-sentence about confronting Mom. The adoption papers I found tucked between pages show we came from four different families, collected like specimens.

My hands shake as I realize the starvation games were never about food at all. The papers are old, yellowed at the edges, each one showing a different birth certificate, different parents, different hospitals across three states. Gino, born in Ohio. Elena in Michigan. Tommy in Indiana. Me in Illinois. Mom collected us like she was shopping, picking specific children for specific reasons.

I spread the papers across the table comparing dates. She adopted Gino first when he was three, then me at two, Elena at 18 months, Tommy at 6 months. Each adoption spaced exactly 14 months apart. The pattern is too precise to be random.

My coffee goes cold while I stare at these documents that rewrite my entire childhood. We weren’t siblings. We weren’t even related. We were subjects in an experiment that started before any of us could remember.

I call the victim’s advocate, Elias, back at dawn, my voice raw from not sleeping. He listens as I explain the journal, the adoption revelation, Mom’s hints about experiments in her letters. He’s quiet for a long moment before saying he knows an attorney who specializes in institutional abuse cases.

I pace my apartment while talking, unable to sit still, the adoption papers clutched in my free hand. Elias asks careful questions about what else I found, whether I’ve told Elena yet, if I’m safe. His voice is steady, professional, but I can hear the concern underneath.

He gives me a name and number for the attorney, tells me to call within the hour before his morning meetings start. I thank him and hang up, then immediately dial the number he gave me, too wired to wait.

Elias connects me with Arjun Medina, a lawyer who’s handled cases involving unethical research on children. We meet at his office that afternoon where I spread out everything. Letters, journal, map, adoption papers. Arjun’s expression grows darker as he examines each piece, finally saying this could be much bigger than family abuse.

His office is downtown, all glass and steel, professional in a way that makes me feel safer somehow. He wears reading glasses that he keeps pushing up while he reads Gino’s journal, his jaw tightening at certain passages. He photographs each document with his phone, asks permission to make copies, handles everything like it’s evidence in a trial.

When he reads Mom’s letter about the map, about where she buried the real reason Gino disappeared, he sets it down carefully and looks at me with an expression I can’t quite read. He says we need to move fast, that if Mom’s letters are hinting at what he thinks they’re hinting at, we’re dealing with premeditated criminal conspiracy spanning decades.

Arjun explains we need to approach this methodically, starting with verifying the adoption records and researching Mom’s academic background. He has investigators who can dig into university archives and track down original families. I feel simultaneously relieved to have professional help and terrified of what we’ll find.

He pulls out a legal pad and starts making notes, asking questions about Mom’s education, where she worked, what she studied. I realize I don’t know basic facts about her life before us. She was just Mom, the person who controlled whether we ate.

Arjun says that’s common in abuse cases, that abusers isolate victims from knowing anything about their background or connections. He asks if I can access any of Mom’s old belongings, anything that might have academic papers or correspondence. I remember boxes in the garage of our old house, stuff the state seized as evidence but later returned to storage. Arjun says we need to get access to those boxes immediately.

That night, I finally open more of Mom’s letters, forcing myself to read her careful words hinting at elegant experiments and genetic selection criteria. She writes about choosing us specifically for certain traits. Gino for his intelligence, Elena for her observational skills, me for my empathy, Tommy for his vulnerability. We were never her children, just research subjects.

Each letter is typed, not handwritten, like she’s writing academic correspondence instead of messages to her son. She uses clinical language, refers to the competitions as interventions, and our responses as data points.

In one letter, she writes that Gino’s high IQ made him the perfect subject for testing cognitive resilience under extreme stress. She picked Elena because psychological assessments showed strong pattern recognition abilities. She chose me because some tests indicated high emotional intelligence and capacity for empathy. Tommy was selected for his anxiety markers and physical fragility. She built a study group of children specifically designed to test different responses to controlled deprivation.

I throw up in my kitchen sink reading this, my body rejecting the truth as much as my mind.

I drive to Elena’s apartment unannounced the next morning, needing to share this with someone who survived the same nightmare. She answers the door looking thin and exhausted, her apartment obsessively organized. When I show her the adoption papers and journal, she starts crying silently, tears running down her face without sound.

Her apartment is almost empty, just basic furniture arranged at perfect right angles, everything labeled and sorted. She invites me in, but doesn’t speak, just takes the papers from my hands and reads them standing in her doorway. I watch her face change as she processes what the documents mean. Sees her own adoption certificate with different parents’ names, a different birthday than the one we always celebrated.

She sinks onto her couch, still holding the papers, still crying without making any noise. I sit next to her and we stay like that for a long time, both of us trying to accept that our entire lives were designed experiments, that we never had real childhoods, just controlled conditions for Mom’s research.

Elena and I spend hours comparing memories, finding patterns we never noticed as children. The competitions had variations that seemed random but now appear systematic, testing pain tolerance, measuring empathy erosion, documenting how hunger affected sibling bonds.

She pulls out her own notebooks where she’s been tracking her PTSD symptoms, and the clinical detail suddenly makes horrible sense. Elena has years of journals, every therapy session documented, every trigger cataloged, every nightmare analyzed. She’s been treating herself like a research subject without realizing it, using the same methods Mom trained into her.

We go through her notebooks together, finding entries that match specific competitions. The week Mom made us hold ice water, Elena documented our pain responses. The month of loyalty tests, she tracked how our relationships deteriorated. She was collecting data even while being tortured, her observational skills so honed by Mom that she couldn’t stop analyzing even her own abuse.

We realize Mom’s training went deeper than we thought, that we’re still performing our assigned roles. Gino, the intelligent one who figured it out. Elena, the observer who documents everything. Me, the empathetic one who tries to save everyone. Tommy, the vulnerable one who breaks.

Elena reveals she’s been in contact with Tommy’s treatment facility, though he’s not ready for visitors yet. His therapists say he dissociates whenever food is mentioned, his mind protecting itself by shutting down completely. The feeding tube isn’t just medical necessity, but psychological requirement because his brain can’t process eating as safe.

She shows me emails from his care team, updates about his progress that mostly document lack of progress. Tommy weighs 92 pounds at 20 years old. He can’t be in rooms with other people eating. He has panic attacks if anyone mentions dinner or meals or hunger. The therapists are trying something called exposure therapy, but it’s going slowly, measured in whether he can tolerate being near an empty plate.

Elena says they’ve asked about our childhood, about what specifically happened around food, and she’s been trying to explain the competitions in clinical terms they can understand. But how do you explain to therapists that your mother starved you scientifically, that every meal was a controlled experiment, that your brother’s brain learned food equals performance equals judgment equals potential death?

I request copies of Mom’s academic papers through Arjun, and reading them feels like looking into the mind of a monster wearing a scientist’s mask. She theorized that controlled starvation could reveal genetic predispositions for resilience, competition, and survival. Her proposal involved longitudinal studies on adopted children, which the ethics board rejected as inhumane.

The full proposal is 30 pages long, outlining exactly what she later did to us. Systematic food deprivation escalating over years. Competition-based resource allocation to test sibling dynamics. Pain tolerance assessments disguised as challenges. Measurement of empathy erosion under extreme stress. Documentation of psychological breaking points.

She even proposed the loyalty tests, asking subjects to harm each other for resources, predicting it would reveal genetic factors and moral flexibility. The ethics board’s rejection letter is scathing, calling her proposal child abuse masquerading as research, saying no institutional review board would ever approve subjecting children to deliberate trauma. They recommended she seek psychological evaluation and banned her from any research involving human subjects.

She left the university 3 months later and started adopting children within the year.

I spread the research papers across Elena’s coffee table, my hands shaking as we pieced together what Mom actually did to us. The leather notebook wasn’t about lying to doctors. It was real data collection. Every competition had measurements. Every time we competed, she recorded our weights, our desperation levels, how long we could endure before breaking.

She documented Tommy’s growth stunting week by week. She noted when Elena started hoarding food, and exactly how many days it took before she passed out. She tracked Gino’s pattern recognition, how he learned to predict her rules, calling it adaptive intelligence under sustained stress.

The notebook had graphs, actual charts showing our declining body weights plotted against competition performance. She measured everything.

Elena finds the page about the loyalty tests where Mom forced us to hurt each other. The notes say, “Subject 3 demonstrates persistent empathy despite conditioning. Continues attempting to protect younger siblings even when starving. Suggests genetic resistance to moral erosion.”

Subject 3 was me.

She saw my guilt over breaking Tommy’s finger as a research finding.

Elena’s crying now, silent tears running down her face as she reads Mom’s observations about her hidden camera. Mom knew about it for weeks before confronting her. Let Elena keep filming because she wanted to see if Elena would successfully document and escape.

The final competition wasn’t punishment. It was the conclusion of her experiment, designed to see if I would finally abandon my siblings when Tommy’s life was actually ending.

I call Arjun the next morning, barely able to speak. He listens while I explain what we found. How the notebook proves premeditation. This wasn’t abuse spiraling out of control. Mom planned everything from the moment she adopted us.

Arjun’s quiet for a long time before responding. He says we need law enforcement involved now that this evidence suggests systematic child abuse for research purposes. He knows a detective who specializes in these cases, someone who will understand the scope of what happened.

Arjun sets up a meeting for that afternoon. Detective Braden Harding meets us at Arjun’s office. A tall man with gray hair and careful eyes. Elena and I sit across from him while Arjun presents everything. The adoption papers showing we came from different families. Gino’s journal entry about DNA. Mom’s academic research proposals. Her rejection letter from the ethics board. The leather notebook with years of data. Mom’s letters hinting at experiments and mentioning where Gino is buried.

Braden takes notes the entire time, his expression growing darker as we talk. He asks specific questions about the competitions, about Dad’s involvement, about how Mom collected and stored her data. When we finish, he’s quiet for several minutes.

Braden explains that if Mom’s letters reference Gino’s burial location, we need to excavate immediately. The map she sent shows the backyard of our childhood home. He needs to confirm what’s actually there before we can move forward with charges.

I feel sick thinking about what they might find, but I know we can’t get answers without digging.

Braden starts making calls right there in Arjun’s office, talking to judges about search warrants, to forensic teams about ground-penetrating radar. He promises to move as fast as possible, but legal processes take time. We need proper authorization before disturbing the property.

The waiting is terrible. I go back to work at the food bank, trying to maintain some piece of normal life while everything explodes around me. But I’m surrounded by the thing Mom weaponized against us. Every hungry person I serve feels like looking in a mirror of my childhood. A woman comes in with three kids, all of them thin and tired, and I have to step outside because I can’t breathe. My coworker finds me sitting on the curb, head between my knees. She touches my shoulder gently and suggests I take time off, that whatever I’m dealing with is clearly too much right now.

I can’t explain that I’m waiting to find out if my mother buried my brother in our backyard.

Elena throws herself into digitizing her hidden camera footage while we wait for the excavation approval. She works 16-hour days creating timestamps and detailed notes for every competition, every instance of abuse, every time Mom recorded data in her notebook. She organizes it all like a research project, clinical and precise.

I visit her apartment and find her surrounded by laptops and external drives, her eyes red from lack of sleep. She’s becoming the observer Mom trained her to be, coping by turning our trauma into documented evidence. I worry about her, but I understand. Sometimes distance is the only way to survive, looking directly at what happened.

Two weeks after meeting with Braden, he calls to say the warrants came through. A forensic team will excavate the backyard tomorrow morning.

Elena and I drive to our childhood home together, neither of us speaking. The house is abandoned now, windows broken and yard overgrown. The oak tree where Mom’s map marked the X is massive, its roots probably wrapped around whatever is buried there.

The forensic team arrives with equipment that looks like it belongs on a construction site: ground-penetrating radar, excavation tools, evidence collection supplies. Braden meets us at the property line and gently suggests we might want to wait somewhere else. We refuse. Elena takes my hand, her fingers cold and shaking. We stand together watching strangers dig up our past.

The excavation takes 6 hours. They use the radar first, finding an anomaly exactly where Mom indicated. Then they start digging carefully, treating it like the crime scene it might be.

Elena and I stand frozen at the property line, unable to move closer but unable to look away. Braden checks on us periodically, but mostly leaves us alone. The sun moves across the sky. The hole gets deeper. Then the team stops digging and starts using brushes and small tools, working carefully around something.

Braden walks over to them, listens to the forensic specialist, then turns toward us. His expression is carefully neutral, but I know before he speaks.

They found something. They found Gino.

Braden approaches slowly, his voice gentle when he confirms what we already know. Human remains buried 6 feet deep, exactly where Mom’s map indicated. The forensic team needs time to properly excavate and document everything, but the initial findings suggest the remains have been there for years.

Gino never ran away. He never made it to the streets. Mom and Dad killed him that night when he lunged for food, and then she buried him in the backyard and continued her experiment with the rest of us. She kept collecting data while our brother decomposed under the oak tree.

The next morning, I spend the next week meeting with Randolph Casey at the prosecutor’s office, going over every piece of evidence we have. He spreads the letters across his conference table, Gino’s journal, Mom’s research notes, the adoption papers. Randolph is methodical, asking questions about dates and details, building the timeline that will become the prosecution’s case.

He warns me this won’t be easy. Mom’s defense attorney will attack everything, try to make the jury doubt what’s right in front of them. Arjun sits beside me through these prep sessions, taking notes, occasionally redirecting when Randolph’s questions get too intense.

We practice my testimony, Randolph playing the role of defense attorney, throwing questions designed to rattle me. He asks if I’m certain the research notes are real, if maybe Mom was just journaling creatively, if Gino might have actually run away like she originally claimed. I force myself to answer calmly, sticking to facts, not letting emotion overwhelm the evidence.

Elena joins us for one session, bringing her organized timeline of abuse documented by the hidden camera. Randolph watches some of the footage, his expression growing harder with each clip. He tells us this visual evidence is powerful, but warns that seeing it in court will be brutal for us.

The preliminary hearing gets scheduled for 3 weeks out, and those weeks crawl by with agonizing slowness. I can’t sleep, can’t focus at work, keep replaying potential testimony in my head. Arjun checks in daily, making sure I’m eating, reminding me to attend my therapy appointments.

The morning of the hearing arrives cold and gray, matching my mood perfectly. Elena meets me outside the courthouse, both of us dressed in clothes that feel foreign and uncomfortable. We hold hands walking up the steps, neither of us speaking because there’s nothing to say that we don’t already know.

The courtroom is smaller than I expected, more intimate, which somehow makes it worse. Randolph guides us to seats behind the prosecution table, explaining the hearing will determine if there’s enough evidence to proceed to trial.

Then the bailiff announces Mom’s entrance and my entire body goes rigid. She walks in wearing an orange jumpsuit, hands cuffed in front of her, and I haven’t seen her face in 8 years. Prison has aged her dramatically. Her hair is completely gray now, skin pale and lined, but her eyes are exactly the same: sharp, calculating, clinical.

She scans the courtroom like she’s taking inventory. And when her gaze lands on me, she doesn’t react at all. No surprise, no emotion, just that same observational stare she used during competitions.

She sits at the defense table and her attorney leans over to whisper something. Mom nods, still watching me, and I realize she’s studying my reactions even now. Collecting data.

The judge enters, and proceedings begin with opening statements. Randolph outlines the evidence, letters hinting at conspiracy, a hand-drawn map leading to human remains, research notes documenting systematic abuse disguised as scientific study. He describes how Mom adopted four unrelated children and subjected them to controlled starvation while recording their responses.

Mom’s attorney, a thin man with wire-rimmed glasses, counters that the prosecution is building a fantasy from circumstantial evidence. He claims the research notes are fiction, creative writing from a woman interested in behavioral science. He suggests Gino’s death was a tragic family violence incident unrelated to any systematic experimentation.

Randolph calls me as the first witness. I walk to the stand on shaking legs, get sworn in, take my seat. Randolph starts with basic questions, establishing my identity and relationship to Mom. Then he moves into the evidence, asking me to describe finding the letters, the map, Gino’s journal.

I explain each discovery methodically, keeping my voice steady despite the tremor in my hands. Randolph shows me Mom’s research notes, asks me to read specific passages aloud. I force myself to speak the clinical descriptions of our suffering, Mom’s hypotheses about genetic resilience and stress adaptation.

When I read the entry about being Subject Three with persistent empathy despite conditioning, my voice finally cracks.

The defense attorney cross-examines me next, his tone respectful but skeptical. He asks how I can be certain the research notes are authentic, not something Mom wrote as fiction or creative exploration. I explain the dates match our childhood. The details are too specific, too accurate.

He suggests maybe I’m misinterpreting notes about a novel or academic paper Mom was writing. I look directly at him and say the notes describe us by our real names alongside subject numbers, document specific competitions and our exact responses.

He pivots, asking about Gino’s disappearance, suggesting my brother might have actually run away as originally reported. I describe the excavation, the remains found exactly where Mom’s map indicated, the forensic evidence of blunt force trauma. He has no good response to that, just moves on to questioning my emotional stability and whether trauma might be affecting my interpretation of evidence.

Arjun objects. The judge sustains it and the cross-examination ends.

Elena testifies next, presenting her hidden camera footage and explaining how she documented 3 months of systematic abuse. She reveals Mom knew about the camera the entire time, allowed it to continue recording as part of the experiment.

The defense attorney tries to suggest the footage could be staged or taken out of context, but Elena has timestamps, metadata, comprehensive documentation that makes his argument sound desperate. Mom’s clinical detachment during our suffering is documented in high definition. Undeniable.

The medical examiner testifies about Gino’s remains, confirming cause of death and approximate timeline. Dad’s confession gets entered into evidence, his statement describing how Mom convinced him Gino was dangerous and needed to be eliminated.

By the end of the day, the defense’s arguments are falling apart under the weight of physical evidence. The judge takes a recess to review everything, and we wait in the hallway for 2 hours.

Randolph seems confident, but warns us judges can be unpredictable. When we’re called back in, the judge addresses the court in a flat official tone. He states the evidence presented shows probable cause that Mom committed murder, conspiracy, and child endangerment for research purposes. He orders her held without bail pending trial, citing flight risk and danger to the community.

Mom shows no reaction to this, just continues taking notes on her legal pad like she’s documenting an interesting experiment.

We leave the courthouse in a daze, the preliminary victory feeling hollow because this is just the beginning. Arjun explains the trial itself could be months away and we’ll have to testify again in much greater detail.

That night, Felix Grimes calls with news that changes everything. His federal investigation has expanded beyond just Mom, tracking her academic connections and correspondence. He’s found evidence she was part of a network, researchers who lost ethics approval and then adopted children to continue their studies privately.

News outlets start covering what they’re calling the adoption research conspiracy, and suddenly our private nightmare is becoming public.

A journalist named Willow Bird contacts Arjun wanting to interview us about systematic abuse in research communities. Arjun brings us the request and Elena and I discuss it for hours before declining. We’re not ready for that level of public attention. Not while still processing everything ourselves.

Elena starts having severe panic attacks within days of the preliminary hearing. The combination of testifying, seeing Mom again, and learning about the larger conspiracy triggers her PTSD worse than ever. She calls me at 3:00 in the morning, hyperventilating, unable to calm down.

I drive to her apartment, find her curled on the bathroom floor, shaking. Arjun recommends a trauma therapist named Alexa Putnam, who specializes in cases like ours, and Elena starts seeing her twice a week.

After Elena’s third session with Alexa, she tells me I should go, too. I’ve been resisting therapy, telling myself I’m handling everything fine, but Elena sees through that. She says learning we were research subjects is a different kind of trauma, separate from the original abuse, and we need help processing what it means.

I make an appointment with Alexa, mostly to support Elena, telling myself I’ll probably just go once.

Alexa’s office is small and comfortable with soft lighting and furniture that doesn’t feel clinical. She asks me to describe what brought me in and I start talking about the investigation, the evidence, the trial preparation. She listens without interrupting, and when I finish, she explains something that makes everything click into place.

She says learning about the research conspiracy is a secondary trauma, forcing us to recontextualize our entire childhood. We thought we were abused children, which is horrible enough, but now we know we were systematically studied while being abused. Our suffering treated as data.

Every moment of pain had an observer taking notes, measuring responses, treating our desperation as experimental results. That realization breaks something in me, and I start crying in her office. Really crying for the first time since we found Gino. Alexa doesn’t try to fix it or make me stop, just sits with me while I process the compounded betrayal.

Four weeks into Felix’s federal investigation, he calls with another update. He’s identified two other families willing to come forward with similar experiences. Their adoptive parents were also researchers who lost ethics approval, who then acquired multiple unrelated children and subjected them to systematic abuse disguised as experiments.

The pattern is undeniable now, too consistent to be coincidence. Felix arranges for us to meet these other survivor families, thinking it might help to connect with people who understand the specific betrayal we experienced.

Elena and I drive to a community center where Felix has organized the meeting, both of us nervous about what we’ll find. The other survivors are scattered in age, the youngest in her 20s, the oldest in her late 40s. We sit in a circle and one by one people share their stories.

The details are eerily similar to ours. Clinical detachment from adoptive parents. Meticulous data collection. The sense that suffering served some larger purpose in their abusers’ minds.

One woman, probably mid-40s, still has her adoptive mother’s research notes, decades of documentation about her responses to food deprivation and isolation. She passes around a notebook filled with handwriting that looks disturbingly similar to Mom’s notes about us.

Another survivor describes endurance experiments, sleep deprivation studies, systematic measurement of psychological breaking points.

The validation is both comforting and devastating, knowing we’re not alone but also knowing this happened to so many children.

After the meeting, Elena and I sit in my car for an hour, not speaking, just processing what we heard. The collective evidence from multiple families gives Felix everything he needs for federal charges. He explains the charges will include conspiracy to commit child abuse, falsifying adoption records for research purposes, and conducting unauthorized human subject research on minors.

This isn’t just about individual families anymore, but about systematic exploitation of the adoption system by researchers who saw children as experimental subjects rather than human beings.

The federal case will run parallel to Mom’s murder trial, building a larger pattern of institutional abuse.

Two months after the preliminary hearing, Michelle Frost calls with news I’ve been both hoping for and dreading. Tommy’s therapists have finally cleared him for supervised visits. Elena and I make plans to drive to the residential facility together, both of us terrified of what we’ll find.

Michelle prepares us carefully over the phone, explaining Tommy is physically stable but emotionally fragile. He’s made progress but still struggles with eating, still dissociates when stressed. She emphasizes we need to let him control the pace of conversation, not push him to process more than he can handle.

The drive to the facility takes 2 hours, and Elena and I barely speak, both lost in our own anxiety about seeing our little brother after years of separation. The facility sits 2 hours outside the city, surrounded by trees that look bare and cold in late November. Elena drives because my hands won’t stop shaking.

We don’t talk much during the ride, just sit with our own fear about what we’ll find when we see Tommy. Michelle warned us he looks different now, that the starvation did things to his body that can’t be fixed. I keep thinking about the last time I saw him, 11 years old and 48 pounds, his heart failing on the bathroom floor.

The building looks more like a nice house than a hospital, which I guess is the point. Michelle meets us in the lobby and takes us through security, explaining the rules as we walk. Tommy gets overwhelmed easily. We need to let him control the conversation. If he needs us to leave, we leave immediately without arguing.

Elena nods along, but I can barely hear the words over the pounding in my chest.

Michelle opens a door to a small visiting room with soft furniture and warm lighting. Tommy sits curled in an oversized chair by the window, and my breath catches when I see him. He’s 20 years old, but looks maybe 15, his body frozen at the size it was when his growth stopped.

The feeding tube runs under his shirt, visible at the neckline. His face is gaunt, cheekbones sharp, eyes too big for his skull. He watches us walk in with an expression I can’t read, something between hope and terror.

I say his name, just his name, and he whispers back something that breaks me. “You came.” His voice is small and uncertain, like he’s been waiting 8 years just to know we didn’t forget about him.

Elena moves first, crossing the room slowly with her hands visible, giving him time to adjust. She sits on the floor near his chair, not touching him, just being close. I follow her lead and sit on the couch across from them.

Tommy asks about our lives now, simple questions delivered in a flat tone that reminds me of how he used to recite lies to the pediatrician. Elena tells him about her apartment and her therapy. I tell him about working at the food bank, leaving out how hard it is to be around food all day. He listens without much reaction, his fingers picking at the fabric of the chair arm in a repetitive pattern that looks like a coping mechanism.

The conversation stays surface level for maybe 15 minutes before Tommy’s breathing changes. He starts looking toward the door, his shoulders tensing. Michelle notices from her spot near the wall and gives us a subtle signal. Elena takes Tommy’s hand gently and tells him it’s okay, we can come back another time.

He nods quickly, relief washing over his face, and we stand to leave. At the door, I turn back and Tommy is watching us with wet eyes. He doesn’t say anything, but he lifts one hand in a small wave.

In the car, Elena and I both fall apart. She pulls into a parking lot 3 miles from the facility and we just sit there crying, not talking, processing what we saw. Tommy is alive, but he’s so damaged, so broken by what Mom did to us—the feeding tube, the stunted growth, the way he couldn’t handle 30 minutes of normal conversation. It feels like Mom is still hurting him even from prison.

But underneath the grief, there’s something else. Something that feels almost like hope. Tommy asked if we’d come back. He wanted to know about our lives. He’s fighting to get better, working with therapists, trying to learn how to eat again. It’s slow and painful, but he’s trying.

Elena and I make a promise sitting in that parking lot. We’ll visit every week. We’ll be the family we couldn’t be when surviving meant competing against each other.

The federal case moves faster than Arjun expected. Felix has been building evidence from multiple families. And within 3 weeks of our visit with Tommy, he calls a meeting at his office. Elena and I arrive to find two other families already there, survivors like us who were adopted by researchers and subjected to systematic abuse disguised as experiments.

Felix spreads documents across the conference table. Email records between Mom and other researchers, discussing their subjects and comparing data. One email from Mom describes Gino’s death in clinical terms, noting his failure to adapt to resource restriction protocols. Another discusses Tommy’s heart failure as an interesting threshold response that provided valuable information about pediatric starvation limits. Reading them makes me physically sick.

The other families share their stories. One woman describes sleep deprivation studies where her adoptive father kept her awake for days to measure cognitive decline. A man talks about isolation experiments where he spent weeks locked in a basement while his adoptive mother recorded his psychological deterioration through a camera system. The patterns are identical to ours: researchers who lost ethics approval for human studies, who then adopted children to use as experimental subjects without oversight.

Felix explains the legal strategy. The researchers formed an informal network sharing methodologies and results through encrypted emails. They collaborated on what amounts to decades of unauthorized human experimentation on adopted children.

The federal charges will include conspiracy to commit child abuse, falsifying adoption records for research purposes, and conducting unauthorized human subject research on minors. This isn’t just about individual families anymore, but about systematic exploitation of the adoption system by researchers who saw children as experimental subjects rather than human beings.

Two weeks later, Randolph calls with news. The prosecution is offering Mom a plea deal—life in prison without parole in exchange for full disclosure about the research network and testimony against the other researchers. He needs to know if Elena and I support the deal or if we want to push for trial.

Elena and I talk it over for hours. A plea deal means we wouldn’t have to testify publicly, wouldn’t have to relive everything in front of cameras and reporters. But it also means giving Mom something she wants: a chance to present her research as legitimate science rather than torture.

We call Randolph back and tell him we’ll accept whatever Mom decides, but we’re not going to beg her to cooperate.

Mom’s attorney takes 3 days to deliver her response. She rejects the deal. According to her lawyer, Mom believes her research was groundbreaking and that we’re living proof of her theories about genetic strength and stress adaptation. She apparently told her attorney that Gino’s death was sad but scientifically necessary to test my empathy limits, to see if starvation could finally make me abandon my siblings.

Hearing that makes me want to throw up. She sees Gino’s murder as a successful experiment. She thinks his death proves something valuable about human behavior. She’s not sorry. She’s not remorseful. She’s proud of what she did to us.

Randolph calls back that evening to explain what happens next. The federal prosecution will prepare for a lengthy trial involving all five families and decades of evidence. It will be emotionally brutal for everyone involved. We’ll have to testify in detail about the abuse, the starvation, the competitions. Everything will become public record. Reporters will cover every moment. Our faces and stories will be everywhere.

Arjun sets up a meeting for Elena, Tommy through video call, and me to discuss whether we’re strong enough for this. Tommy appears on the screen from the facility looking tired but present. Elena and I sit together on my couch.

We talk for 2 hours about what a trial means, how hard it will be, how exposed we’ll feel. But we keep coming back to the same thing: we owe this to Gino. We owe it to the other victims. If Mom won’t cooperate, if she wants to force a trial to defend her research, then we’ll testify and make sure everyone knows what she really did.

Alexa starts preparing me for trial testimony through something she calls exposure therapy. Twice a week, I sit in her office and recount specific memories from childhood—the competitions, the starvation, breaking Tommy’s finger, finding Gino’s remains. She has me tell each story repeatedly until the emotional intensity starts to decrease, until I can talk about what happened without completely falling apart or dissociating.

It’s the hardest work I’ve ever done, reliving those moments on purpose, describing them out loud over and over, feeling all the shame and grief and rage without being able to escape into numbness. Some sessions I can barely speak through the tears. Other times, I feel nothing at all, just empty recitation of facts. Alexa says both responses are normal, that trauma therapy isn’t linear.

Elena does similar work with her own therapist. We compare notes sometimes, finding dark humor in how we’re both essentially training ourselves to be better witnesses, to present our trauma in ways a jury can understand and believe. It feels wrong somehow, packaging our suffering into neat narratives for legal consumption. But it’s necessary if we want justice.

The job required me to hear other people’s abuse stories daily, to sit with their pain while helping them find legal options. Some days it was overwhelming, triggering memories of competitions and Gino’s death and Tommy’s collapse. But most days, it felt like reclaiming power, helping others get the justice and protection we almost didn’t get. I was building a life where my worst experiences became tools for helping people instead of just scars I carried.

Tommy moved to a supervised group home after 18 months of intensive residential treatment, a milestone his therapists once thought impossible. The group home had six residents, all young adults with severe eating disorders requiring ongoing support. Staff prepared meals and sat with residents during eating times, providing the structure Tommy needed to function.

He still struggled with food and probably always would, his relationship with eating permanently damaged by years of competitions and starvation. But he was learning to trust that food would be available tomorrow, that he didn’t have to compete or earn the right to eat. The group home felt like progress, even though he’d likely need some level of supervised care for the rest of his life.

Elena and I started visiting him every week, driving to the group home on Sunday afternoons to sit with him in the common room. We were slowly building the sibling relationship that abuse prevented, learning how to be family instead of competitors. Tommy was relearning how to trust us, accepting that we wanted to spend time with him without ulterior motives or hidden competitions.

The visits were often quiet and awkward, all three of us struggling with small talk and normal sibling dynamics. But we kept showing up, kept trying to repair bonds that Mom deliberately shattered. Sometimes Tommy would mention a memory from childhood, and we’d carefully discuss what really happened versus what Mom told us was happening. We were reconstructing our shared history, separating truth from the experimental framework Mom imposed.

Two years after they found Gino’s remains in the backyard, Elena, Tommy, and I visited his grave together for the first time. We’d all needed different amounts of time to be ready for that moment, and finally our healing had progressed enough to face it as siblings.

The cemetery was quiet on a Tuesday morning, just the three of us standing at Gino’s headstone, reading the dates that marked his too short life. Elena brought flowers. Tommy brought a basketball because Gino loved the game. I brought a photo of the four of us from before the abuse started, when we still looked like normal kids.

We stood in silence for a long time, each processing grief in our own damaged ways. Tommy cried quietly. Elena stared at the headstone with clinical detachment. I felt rage mixing with sorrow that Gino never got to escape like we did.

We’d started family therapy together 3 months earlier, the three of us working to heal together instead of in isolation. The therapist helped us understand that we’d been deliberately turned against each other, that the competition programming wasn’t our fault. We were learning to support each other instead of seeing each other as obstacles or threats.

The work was slow and painful, requiring us to confront memories we’d rather forget and acknowledge damage that would never fully heal. We’d carry these scars forever, the psychological impact of being treated as research subjects instead of children.

But we were alive. We were together. And we were fighting to make sure what happened to us never happened to another child.

That wasn’t healing. Not yet. But it was a beginning.