The morning after? It smelled of bacon grease and fear.
Adam had arrived at six-thirty, before anyone was properly awake, letting himself in through the back door the way he always did, as though my kitchen were an extension of The Bullpen’s. By the time I stumbled downstairs in my bathrobe, he’d already commandeered every burner on my stove. Scrambled eggs with crème fraîche. Thick-cut bacon. Crispy hash browns fried in duck fat. A soothing fruit salad with melon, blueberries, mandarin orange slices, shredded mint, and honey. And coffee strong enough to strip varnish off a Victorian sideboard. Adam had brought everything in Cambros, thereby sparing my fridge and countertops. He moved efficiently, quietly, as if he’d run a professional kitchen for twenty years, and with the economy of someone who doesn’t have the luxury of wasted motion.
John came downstairs ten minutes later, no doubt aroused by the smell of applewood smoked bacon. He took one look at the assembled company and started setting the table without prompting. What I love about John: nothing is performative. He just helps. He assesses the situation and simply does what needs doing.
The posse gathered around my big, round dining room table: Laura, John, Adam, Basti, Kaira — and Isabelle, who had slept all of forty minutes last night and looked like she’d aged a decade. She sat with both hands wrapped around my Fuck Off coffee mug, staring out at nothing and at no one, oblivious to the animated conversation in which she was immersed, and of which she was the center of attention. I was listening, however, while also keeping watch over her as I had since she was born — looking for signs, signals, and the small tells that meant she was about to go under. I could feel them. She was close. Very close.
Adam laid his huge spread on the table, and we dug in like voracious wolves — exhausted and famished, we ate in silence for the first few minutes. Even Adam, who normally had the uncanny ability to tell colorful anecdotes while simultaneously julienning carrots and calculating a player’s ERA — he had nothing to say.
Basti’s ADHD caught up with him, however. He quickly cured his boredom by stealing three pieces of Kaira’s bacon. She stabbed his hand with her fork without so much as looking up, after which he proceeded to stuff all three slices in his mouth at once. I tried not to laugh; he looked like a chipmunk. At the same time, I was mentally revisiting the steps for the Heimlich maneuver: get behind, make a fist, grab the fist, lean the person forward, pull sharply inward and upward. Repeat until item blocking the windpipe is expelled.
Suddenly, Laura, who had appeared pensive and distracted, set down her coffee and redirected her attention from some distant coordinate in the ether to everyone gathered around the table. “We need to talk logistics,” she said forcefully. It was time.
All the nervous breakfast banter abruptly came to a halt — this was what we’d all been waiting for. Some direction.
“Isabelle cannot be seen coming or going from this property,” Laura said. “I suppose that’s obvious. Until we have this figured out — what we’re doing, how we’re doing it — there can be no walks, no errands, no sitting on the front stoop. And no sitting in the parts of the backyard where neighbors can see from upstairs.”
Isabelle set her mug down with a small, controlled plunk. “I’m supposed to just stay inside?” She was irritated. “For how long?”
“We don’t know yet,” Laura replied.
“But I have school. I have to work.” Isabelle’s eyes were welling up.
“You can easily take a leave from school,” I said. “Medical, personal, whatever the registrar needs to hear. I mean, really. You’re not going to want to be crossing paths with Lichter or some of the male students in your class, am I right? So, it seems best to just drop out temporarily, at least until we have things sorted.”
“So I just disappear?” She looked around the table. “I just stop existing?”
“For now, yes,” I said sternly. “You’ll have all of us. And we’ll do our best to keep you entertained. And you’ll have no expenses living here, so no need to work.”
She stared at me for a long moment. In the silence, the refrigerator hummed, a bird thudded against the dining room window, the neighbor’s chihuahua yapped — the ordinary sounds of an ordinary morning in a house where nothing was ordinary anymore.
“They get to keep their jobs,” she said, sneering, resentful. “Their apartments, their friends, their freedom. That is fucked. And I have to hide in a garage.”
“You are someone worth protecting,” Kaira said quietly.
“All of this is just until we’ve worked through the logistics of bringing these pitbulls to heel,” Laura added. “This nightmare will end. Count on it.”
“How is it even possible to bring them to heel?” Isabelle was frazzled, distraught. She couldn’t think straight.
“It’s going to take some time, sweetheart,” I said. ”But I think you know how Laura and I operate. When we’ve decided how a thing is going to go down, it will be going down. Full stop. You’re going to need to be patient. Your best distraction will be immersing yourself in the planning. We are going to need as much help from you as you can handle emotionally — like every gory detail about these fuckers, and the names of everyone in their orbit.”
Everyone around the table was nodding; John smiled gently.
Isabelle pushed her plate away — she’d barely touched her food. This deliberate, small gesture meant only that she was lost in thought. She’d been doing this since she was a little girl. Don’t clear the table, folks. At some point, she will attack those cold leftovers with a vengeance.
“Okay,” she said, turning to Laura. “Tell me the plan.”
The plan, such as it was, started with the weekend.
On Friday night, Isabelle’s closest and most trusted friends arrived. They came in groups of two, parking three or four blocks away and approaching the house on foot through the alley, as Laura had instructed. Location-finding apps on everyone’s phones were to be disabled; no flashlights were to be used, including those on their phones. And there was to be no loud talking when walking through the neighborhood, as it was likely that some of the aforementioned men were keeping watch on my house. The girls’ voices would be recognizable.
Everyone had been briefed, to some degree, on what was going on and what had been happening to Isabelle. Kaira had handled all of that, working through a text chain that Laura had set up on Signal and would delete by Sunday. None of Isabelle’s friends were privy to all the details, because knowing too much wasn’t safe for anyone, especially Isabelle. The friends began arriving, their arms full of thrift store treasures — it looked like a Gen Z version of a wedding shower, though no one was getting married. Maren came bearing blackout curtains she’d sewn by hand, in thick navy linen, hemmed with the precision of someone who took her craft seriously. Simone brought several bolts of string lights, a 12-pack of rechargeable batteries and a recharging pack, and Jade had a vintage rug rolled under one arm and was gripping a box of vintage ceramic pots with the other hand. Two other girls — Petra and Rose — brought a sound system on a collapsible hand truck: a 1980s turntable, amplifier, and speakers, along with two crates of albums. Someone whose name I didn’t catch brought a huge box of cleaning supplies, and someone else had gifted a Cost Plus bag of scented pillar candles, a box of books, and a bottle of Grocery Outlet Malbec. All of these items were essentials for any 20-something-year-old.
Basti arrived last, because he was always the last to arrive. He’d stopped at the Army surplus store on the south side and had gotten Isabelle three pairs of men’s cargo pants, in what he hoped was her size, three black and four navy crew-neck T-shirts, and a pair of steel-toed combat boots. Also, inexplicably, he came bearing a grocery store geranium, probably intended for someone convalescing.
“It’s for her windowbox,” he said when Kaira rolled her eyes.
“Ah, there’s no windowbox, Basti,” Kaira noted.
“Well, I’ll fix that,” Basti replied. And by midnight, he had.
The friends worked through the night, as I watched from the back doorway for a good while — before Laura gently pointed out that my hovering wasn’t helping and handed me a glass of wine. So, inside I went and sat at the kitchen table, continuing to listen from a distance. It was a lovely din, the sound of young women (and Basti) transforming my garage barn into a fun, livable space. They bickered about music, some wanting Miley Cyrus, others hating that, and Kaira wanting Rascal Flatts, eliciting groans from the entire peanut gallery. Finally, all were settled on Billy Eilish and PinkPantheress, which they cranked, singing along at the choruses. Industrious, determined. Cheerful manic was the vibe that last hour of the barn-raising — a bit like the hour before a major deadline at an office gig, when panic converts itself into focus.
By two in the morning, the garage was — well, not beautiful, exactly. But it was theirs.
Maren and Jade had hung the blackout curtains with military precision. Petra had scrubbed the floors on her hands and knees until they were completely free of debris and resembled fresh-poured concrete. Rose set up the turntable on a shelf Basti had bolted to the wall; the string lights ran in a warm zigzag across the length of the “living room.” The plants were arranged on a makeshift shelf near one of the windows on the backyard side of the barn, intermingled with a trio of grow lights. Basti’s geranium was in a new window box near the garage door, as promised.
Isabelle’s art supplies occupied an entire corner of the space: canvases stacked upright, jars of brushes arranged by size on a huge woodworking table, and tubes of paint organized by color in a system only Isabelle understood. I’d set up her easel, and we’d installed a generous amount of overhead lighting since she’d not have the benefit of natural light, unless she chose to work in the backyard some days. I’d also created a spot next to the utility sink for washing brushes.
“This is actually pretty cute,” Maren said, standing back with her hands on her hips.
“Ugh. It’s a garage,” Isabelle groaned.
“It feels like a sanctuary to me — I’d take this in a heartbeat. Better than sharing a two-bedroom flat with three other women.” Kaira complained.
“Alright, alright. It’s pretty fucking cool. You’re right,” Isabelle admitted.
It was time to crash. Everyone was exhausted, but it was a bit too late for anyone, especially the girls, to be driving home, so three of them piled into Isabelle’s king-size bed, and Basti passed out on the couch. Everyone else holed up in the guest bedroom in the house.
The important transformation happened Saturday night.
I’d been expecting resistance, bracing for it, in fact. I know my daughter and the way she goes still and flat when someone tells her what to do with her body or how to dress. She clenches her teeth and gets a steely look in her eyes. No way comes across loud and clear even though polite words are coming out of her mouth.
Simone constructed her workstation in the center of the garage: a folding chair on a wood pallet, a pile of towels, and scissors and combs laid out on a metal table like surgical instruments, two boxes of hair dye in a deep auburn — a carefully considered color based on Isabelle’s skin tones. Her new color needed to look natural even if it wasn’t.
Isabelle sat down. She was all in. She pulled her hair over one shoulder and held it there for a moment, glancing briefly at the long, pale ponytail. She didn’t need this anymore, this thing that had been drawing the wrong kind of attention since she was fourteen years old. She was happy to let it go. Fuck it.
“Do it,” she said. “Make it gone. And don’t stop to ask me if I’m okay. I’m OK.”
Simone began cutting. First, the big chop. Twelve inches straight across, now in a pile on the floor. Simone kicked it out of the way, as there was so much of it that she was afraid of slipping. Isabelle ran both hands through her newly shorn locks. Damn, it felt liberating. She was glad there were no mirrors. She couldn’t care less how any of this was going to look. It felt amazing, and that’s all she cared about. Fuck mirrors.
“Keep going, please,” Isabelle encouraged. And so Simone dug in, using thinning shears to lower the weight and volume of her hair before doing the precision cutting. They decided to aim for a shoulder-length shag. Something a bit alt and careless-looking. Something as far from soft girl as possible.
By the time Simone was finished with the cut, Isabelle had shed nearly 14 inches, her face framed by a gently ragged, disheveled bob. She already looked like someone else altogether. They were getting somewhere.
Then came the dye. This was actually the hard part.
Simone worked section by section, methodically, quietly, as Isabelle sat very still, eyes closed, meditating to melodic techno and the smell of developer and red coupler — which had an oddly comforting chemical warmth. The other young women buzzed around Isabelle, continuing the garage project in hushed voices, folding underwear and T-shirts into drawers, arranging books on shelves, stacking plates and lining up glassware on papered shelves in the kitchenette area, fluffing pillows, and organizing clothes on makeshift garment racks. The sheer force of this domestic activity swept away all the trauma, making room for a new normality. Pretty sure women have been doing this sort of thing since the beginning of time. It is truly one of the most underrated forms of love.
After Isabelle’s long stretch of sitting under a heat lamp, Simone rinsed her hair in the utility sink, then brought her back to the chair for a blow-out, and some final dry cutting and texturizing. When done, Simone pulled off her apron and stepped back, signaling for everyone else to stop what they were doing and take a look.
Isabelle glowed under the string lights. Her color was dark — a complex blend of rich browns, copper-red highlights, and a few flecks of deep gold like the autumn hillsides. The new color and cut had changed everything, and not just aesthetically. This new hair changed the frequency Isabelle was broadcasting. The blonde had been one signal, whether she’d meant it to be or not — a particular kind of visibility that men had learned to read as availability. The new look was something else altogether. Complex, Challenging. Strong. Elusive. Independent. This was a woman who made her own choices. Most men were too weak to handle a woman like this.
There was no more Isabelle. This was Izzy.
Izzy, a name Isabelle had wanted to use her entire life. Now here she was, adopting this name out of necessity. It was like a seismic slip-lock.
“Oh, wow,” Kaira said softly, in awe.
Izzy didn’t need a mirror. The expressions on her friends’ faces told her everything she needed to know. In fact, she asked Basti to take the one and only mirror in the room and set it in the garden. She then had him replace it with one of her large, colorful canvases.
Simone’s work was done. She began her clean-up and pack-up. Jade handed Izzy some thick-framed glasses with non-prescription lenses, and Izzy tried them on. Everyone went quiet for a second time. It was clear: Izzy would be able to walk past Caden Galt on the street, and he would not see Isabelle. He would have no interest in this new woman. Caden, Isabelle’s former boyfriend who had the intelligence of a sponge, wouldn’t know whether this brunette was at peak ovulation or sporting a penis under those cargo pants. He only knew what he’d seen in the manosphere. And she was not that.
“I’m guessing I look like a different person,” Izzy reiterated for the umpteenth time.
“Oh, yeah,” Laura said. She and I had just popped our heads into the garage to check out the progress. We were flabbergasted.
I feel like myself,” Izzy said, and there was something in her voice I couldn’t quite pinpoint. It wasn’t happiness. Certainly not grief, nor disappointment. It was something more complicated. I believe it was relief.
“Maybe,” Basti said carefully, “you now look as you’ve always thought of yourself, instead of how these men decided you should be.”
She looked at Basti.
“Okay,” she said. “That lands.”
The next day, Sunday, we were back at the table.
It was just me, Laura, Adam, and a couple of new faces: Diana Shields, a family-law attorney and Laura’s college roommate, and a woman named Cora Fineman who ran victim advocacy services at the regional women’s center — a woman with a calm, precise manner. Laura had called them in without any advance warning, because that’s how Laura rolls. Waiting for permission is usually too slow; better to forge ahead, then ask for forgiveness. She knew this: the right experts at this very moment were going to save us a shit ton of time — time we didn’t have. And amateur guesswork — well, we couldn’t afford that either. We needed people who could connect the dots for us, and quickly.
We had coffee. We had yellow legal pads. And we had Adam’s chicken salad croissants, which were a guarantee he would never be short on female companionship.
Diana distributed the legal pads like a dealer at a blackjack table, then clicked her ballpoint pen impatiently, waiting for us to quit jabbering and get down to work. “Let me be clear about what we can and can’t do,” she said, without preamble, “because I want to save us forty minutes of movies.”
“Movies?” Adam asked.
“Witness protection. False identities. Government-issued Social Security numbers, new birth certificates, the whole shebang. That’s the federal witness protection program. It’s administered by the U.S. Marshals. It’s for people who’ve testified against organized crime or terrorism and whose lives are in documented danger at the federal prosecution level.” She tapped her pen on the pad. “It’s not available for victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, or stalking, regardless of how serious or how organized. I’m sorry. That’s just the reality.”
Laura nodded slowly. She’d been expecting this, I could tell. I hadn’t. This was disappointing.
“So what can we do?” I asked.
Diana turned to Cora, who opened a slim folder.
“Quite a bit, actually,” Cora said. “But we have to be systematic. And we have to be patient. And most importantly, we have to document everything we do, because some of these steps have legal implications and we need a clear record.”
She pulled out a sheet and set it on the table between us, and what followed was one of the more chilling hours of my life — not because of what Cora said, but because of the expressions on everyone’s faces while she was saying it.
California’s address confidentiality program — Safe at Home, which was administered through the Secretary of State’s office — could give Isabelle a designated substitute mailing address, an official one accepted by specified state, county, and city government agencies, so that her real location didn’t appear in any public records. Safe at Home records a single address (a monitored P.O. box) that is accepted by specified state and county entities and designated for voter registration, the DMV, etc. The program would forward her mail and could serve as an agent for service of process. It was not a magic cloak, Cora said. It was a legal mechanism that required going through an authorized enrollment process with documentation of the situation. It wouldn’t automatically reach every school record, employer, private business, or financial account — those would each need to be handled separately. But it was a meaningful foundation that would help Isabelle “disappear.”
“So she’d need to document what happened,” I said.
“Yes, and sooner rather than later,” Cora said. “Even if it’s not time for law enforcement to kick in, the documentation matters. She needs to begin the paper trail. It will make a difference later.”
“Later,” I repeated.
“Yes, later,” Cora said. “Trust me on this. From all you’ve described, sadly there will be a ‘later.’ This is just the reality of these sorts of situations. So, best for Isabelle to bring all documentation you’ve already gathered and sit down with a female desk officer to write up a complaint about the men involved. This could factor in should there be further aggressions — the police will respond differently with this information in front of them.”
Then there was her phone. The device itself was compromised — not just the number, but the hardware, if she’d ever let anyone else handle it, if she’d ever connected to an unfamiliar network, if she’d ever installed an app that requested location or contact access. Laura laid Isabelle’s phone on the table like evidence, which it essentially was, and explained that they’d already removed the SIM card and powered it down, but that if anyone had installed tracking software, that could have been activated before they took those precautions.
“I need to go through this with a forensics tool,” Laura said. “So for now, it stays off. In fact, it would be better if we just got her a new phone and put in every protection ahead of its use.”
“That phone was her whole life,” I said. “Every contact, every photo —.”
“Well, keeping it could cost Izzy her life. So there’s that.” Laura laid it out: “Every contact and every photo on here is likely accessible to them. I think this is one of those moments where starting from scratch is preferable. There is no good alternative to be considered,” Laura said. Not unkindly. “All right.” I agreed to this on Isabelle’s behalf.
And so it was to be. A new phone. Prepaid, cash purchase, no account linkage. This new number would be known only to people at this table and a well-vetted group of friends, all of whom would have to agree to have their phones cleared of potential spyware. Going forward, two-factor authentication would be set up on every account Izzy kept that was tied to the new number, and she’d get a new recovery email address — fresh accounts all-around, no association with her name, everything hosted by a provider Laura would select. Recovery codes would be printed and stored physically in a safe offsite; nothing stored digitally.
“I need to write all this down,” I said. “I’ve already written it down,” Laura countered, and slid a folder across the table. It was color-coded. Of course it was. And Laura had seen to it that a safe was installed next door at Roger’s, our district attorney, someone we trusted implicitly. All account credentials would be kept there going forward, and Roger would be nearby as a backup for retrieving this information should we be away from the area.
Then there were Isabelle’s social media accounts — and there were a lot of them. This was the piece that made her go quiet for quite a spell. We’re talking about five years of work that went into creating these spaces. This is where Isabelle promoted and sold her artwork. It’s where she had a professional presence, where every collaboration and conversation and commission lead lived, here in these virtual spaces. These were her art galleries and where the audiences she’d cultivated gathered — interacting with her post by post, through thousands of comments and replies. It was gut-wrenching to imagine dismantling all of this.
“We won’t delete any of this,” Diana said. “Deletion destroys evidence. But we will lock down all social media accounts — new passwords, new recovery, log out of all sessions, review connected apps, the whole nine yards. Everything will stay archived. But Isabelle will stop appearing in these spaces. It will be as if she just dropped off the face of the earth.”
“And what happens when an outsider looks at these spaces?” I asked.
“They find an account that has gone dark. Consistent with someone who’s been traumatized and stepped back, or someone who is simply tired of social media and has left to do other things. Take your pick.” Diana paused. “Which scenario do you prefer?” Hmm. We’d have to think about that.
The financial accounts. Close anything that might have been compromised that bears her name. Move funds carefully, lawfully — no large cash withdrawals that could trigger reporting requirements, no transfers that looked like flight. Open new accounts in her assumed name at other institutions, preferably ones far away, and link these to her designated P.O. box — the one managed by the state — the one that can legally be used on all public and government documents in lieu of a physical address. This would frustrate the hell out of anyone trying to stalk her. That’s exactly what taking these steps is intended to do. All of this would take time, and it would require careful sequencing because accounts that suddenly look empty attract attention, and attention is not something we could afford.
“My car,” Isabelle said. “What about my car?”
“Adam,” I said. “Tell her what.”
Adam, who had been sitting at the table stone-faced, arms crossed, was giving off the vibe of a mob enforcer — someone impatiently waiting for permission to inflict direct physical pain on a perpetrator. He was wound up, big time.
“I have a 2014 Honda Civic with Washington plates that nobody is driving,” he said. “Gray. Nondescript. The most forgettable car in North America. Still registered to my step-Aunt, so it’s unlikely it could be traced to me, especially since she’s been married twice since 2014 and hasn’t bothered to update the DMV. The tags, however, are up to date, as is the insurance, and it’s got limo tint on all the side windows. I’ve parked it at Erin’s, in the alley, and have already passed both sets of keys on to Basti. So it’s whenever you are.”
“I can’t just take your car —”
“You’re not taking it. I’m lending it to you. Indefinitely. Better than leaving it garaged for years on end and letting the hoses dry rot. Nobody who knows you has seen me drive this car. I’d been lending it to my housekeeper, but she got sent back to Mexico.” He paused. “It has a new set of floor mats, for whatever that’s worth.”
Isabelle almost smiled. But not quite. “What about my real car, the one I actually own? Where did that end up?”
“Thomas drove it to his family’s cottage on Lake Tahoe, and it’s sitting in their four-car garage. It can sit there indefinitely. Pretty sure none of these folks we’ve had problems with have connections up there,” Adam said. “And since I’m regularly private cheffing for the Esterhazys, I can turn over the ignition when I’m up that way and take it for a spin — you know, when I’m out foraging and whatnot. There is nothing to worry about.”
Then Cora talked about Isabelle’s college records — her credits, grades, grants and loans. These were not things that could disappear, nor did Isabelle want that to happen. She had worked hard in her classes, was near completion of her Associate’s Degree, and had anticipated continuing on to a four-year institution. Yes, the leave of absence would put all of these things on hold, but it didn’t resolve the underlying problem: anyone at Logan Hill who knew her real name could confirm her enrollment status, and faculty, like Gordon Lichter, could access just about anything else in her confidential files. The registrar’s office was not automatically bound by confidentiality to the same extent as, say, a medical provider. If someone called claiming to be a family member, a landlord, or a prospective employer, they would likely get the information they needed simply by asking the right questions. Logan Hill was not exactly Fort Knox.
“So I have to tell the school?” Isabelle asked. “I have to go in and tell someone what happened?”
“Yes, you need to talk to the Title IX office and to the dean of students,” Diana said. “And yes, that’s a conversation that should be done in person, with documentation, and with me present. They have obligations to you that they may not currently know how to fulfill. It is my job to fill them in on the hard facts and to document everything in writing so they can’t wriggle out of this or convey your details to the wrong people.”
“Obligations they’ll want to minimize, no doubt,” Isabelle added, thinking of how much money Gordon Lichter brought to the school in the way of art endowments.
“Yes,” Diana said. “That’s why I’ll be there. So there’s no bullying.”
Cora also talked about data brokers — those invisible clearinghouses that aggregate your address, your phone number, your relatives’ names, your employment history, and sell it to anyone willing to pay five dollars for a background check. She had a list of service providers that were experts at submitting opt-out requests and could do so on Isabelle’s behalf. This wasn’t a permanent fix because the databases are constantly rebuilding themselves from new sources, but it was better than doing nothing. And when done in tandem with the state government’s new, legal, monitored address — any stalker would find himself hitting one brick wall after the next. Frustrating stalkers was the name of the game. All of this could take weeks, but it was well worth doing.
And then there were the public photographs. The ones at the college, on department pages, in event coverage. The ones friends had posted over the years. The ones that existed in any searchable form with her name attached.
“I can’t make people delete their personal photos,” Isabelle said.
“No,” Laura said. “But you can ask. And the ones on institutional sites — the school, the gallery she showed at last spring, the arts council newsletter — those we can request be removed.”
“Request. But not demand. Right?”
“Some of them will comply because it’s the right thing to do. Some will require a formal legal request. Some probably won’t budge.” Laura folded her hands on the table. “We go after the ones we can get and document those we can’t.”
Isabelle was quiet for a moment. Outside, a car passed slowly in front of the house. It was one of those Dodge Chargers with a low, aggressive-sounding engine. We all heard it.
“And after all of this,” Isabelle said — “After I change my phone and address and my hair and my name, and my social media and my banking and school records and my car. After I learn to change my gait and take new routes to get around town, and I get practiced at pretending not to recognize old friends when I’m in public…” She stopped. “After all of that — what are the odds this will work?”
Nobody answered immediately, which was its own kind of answer.
“Well, it significantly reduces your exposure,” Cora said. “It doesn’t eliminate risk. No plan does. But the math is good.”
“The men who did this to me,” Isabelle said, “are still walking around. In this town. Going to work. Going to church. Eating out. Living their lives. And I’m the one who needs an entire team to be safe.”
“Yes,” I said. “I know. That’s not justice. I get it. Right now, safety is what we can actually get you. Justice is step two.” I held her gaze. “And it is coming. I promise you that.”
She looked at me for a long while. “Okay,” she said, for the second time in two days.
She was down for it. This plan of ours.
Our full operational plan took shape over the three days to follow. Gallons of coffee were involved, as well as copious amounts of carry-out and, of course, many of Laura’s color-coded folders. Adam saw to sending a square meal every evening. We were good.
Adam’s contribution to the overall operation was practical and elegant. The Bullpen would function as a logistics hub. Discreet transportation was available when needed, coordinated through his head waiter, Marcus, and two longtime kitchen staff members who had been carefully vetted and were personally vouched for by Adam. Food and various other supplies could arrive on my front porch in Bullpen delivery packaging so as to avoid attracting attention — a restaurant making a residential delivery was unremarkable in a food-obsessed town. The Bullpen’s reservation system, it turned out, was also a useful timeline generator, and Adam had a gift for remembering who came in with whom and when, a skill he’d honed over the many years he’d overseen a dining room. Many of our perpetrators were regulars at The Bullpen’s bar. This was good.
“You’ve been doing this a while,” Laura noted with admiration as she watched him sketch out a rough communication protocol on the back of a delivery receipt. “I’ve been watching men behave badly in my dining room for fifteen years,” Adam said. “I’ve just been waiting for a reason to do something useful with it.”
John handled the physical logistics: a new lock on the garage with keys available to everyone in our group, four exterior cameras that fed into a monitor in my kitchen and a second monitor on Laura’s phone, and a set of protocols for anyone approaching the property. John did all of this with the unhurried competence of a man who has managed a working cattle ranch and knows that security is all about good video equipment and computers rather than high drama and firearms.
Basti and Kaira took charge of Isabelle’s daily life within the compound. They rotated 24-hour availability via phone and text, so Isabelle always had someone she could trust within reach, and they developed a communication system that used Signal’s disappearing messages and compiled a set of code words to describe specific situations. Basti, who had more money than he ever admitted to, deployed it with his characteristic obliqueness, quietly sourcing a set of fixed-blade knives in hand-tooled sheaths from a shop he trusted and giving them to all the girls in Isabelle’s orbit, along with a short primer on how to use them properly.
Laura organized the digital documentation — every screenshot, every date, every account change, every opt-out request, every correspondence with the school, all of it logged and backed up in three separate encrypted locations. She did this the way she did everything: with the systematic precision of a microbiologist who understands that integrity depends on keeping detailed records. At some point, these records would matter. This we knew.
And I wrote. Not just my daily column — but everything else. I chronicled what I had seen, what I knew, what I could prove, and what I suspected. I wrote the way I had written every major story of my career, which is to say, I wrote as though a jury would eventually read it, because, hopefully, juries would.
The young women in Isabelle’s circle organized themselves with a speed and discipline that I found quietly astonishing. They developed a communications protocol that they administered themselves, independent of our oversight, that was on a second Signal chain — one that Laura and I were not privy to. What I did see were the results: six young women who moved through their ordinary lives with new awareness, who watched and remembered and reported back through Kaira, and who never once faltered in covering for Isabelle’s absence among all their peer groups. And they kept track of the men. Their comings and goings, their interactions (at least the ones they could see), and they followed all of the local gossip. Were these men stalking other women? What else were they up to? Had there been any sexual assaults?
If anyone asked, Isabelle had gone to stay with a relative. She was taking some time. Dealing with a family situation. She’d likely be back, though when was the question. The girls’ stories were consistently unscripted and vague — basically fact-free — which made them hard to follow up on and even harder to dispel.
On Thursday, ten days after we’d moved Isabelle out of her apartment, she was desperate to know — was any of this working?
“It’s too soon to say,” I said.
“It’s been ten days. I can’t stay in that garage forever.” She was exasperated.
And she was right. She couldn’t stay holed up forever. I knew it. She knew it. We all knew it. The whole point of the transformation was so she could function in the world; how would we know whether she could do so without trying? Remaining fearful and guarded was not a sustainable security strategy.
So we made our plans. First, a trip to the Safeway on the north end of town — but not Blink’s. No way, no how. We weren’t going anywhere near Howard or Caden or Lichter — none of their haunts. Isabelle would have to go in alone, new purse and shopping list in hand. She’d also be sporting her new soft butch clothing and faux distressed combat boots. I would then come in separately and give her a wide berth as she made her way through the store. We mustn’t be seen together. Adam’s gray Civic would be parked near the store entrance, and Isabelle would keep her burner phone and fixed-blade knife in her right pocket in the event of an emergency. Twenty minutes. This was going to be the hard limit on this first grocery store run.
I watched Isabelle cross the parking lot from her car and felt something I can only describe as controlled terror — the kind you have when you’ve done everything you can think of, but you know it still might not be enough.
Isabelle walked differently. She was now Izzy. That was the first thing I noticed. She’d been practicing, she told me later, in the garage — learning to take up less lateral space, to keep her gaze at mid-distance rather than bright and open, and to carry her shoulders with purpose rather than ease. She was more upright than usual, resisting the instinct to shrink in apology. She needed to be different. A woman with a specific place to be, who had no interest in detours or distractions, and who was not interested one iota in men. A woman with a distinctive dyke vibe. Strong and sure of herself.
I followed Izzy in. Took a basket. Went to the produce section.
She was on the cereal aisle, across the store, when I saw him. Tall, blond, Seahawks jersey, talking on his phone in a voice too loud for indoors. Posturing. I recognized him from the Telegram screenshots — a peripheral figure, one of the boys from Caden’s social circle, not one of the inner ring but close enough. He’d no doubt seen a hundred pictures of Isabelle. I moved left, keeping an end-cap between us and straining to hear what he was conveying on his phone: “Yeah, she just vanished. No one’s seen her in like two weeks. Caden’s losing his shit about this. It’s making him look bad. He’s lost control of the situation.”
My heart stopped. Isabelle was turning the corner into his aisle. Did she even know this guy? He knew her.
Then, she was six feet from him. Then three. Then she was passing him, close enough to brush his sleeve, her gaze fixed on the spice shelf, her hand reaching for a bottle of turmeric. He glanced at her the way men glance at any woman — sizing her up. To my great relief, he decided she wasn’t worth looking at.
The disguise worked. He looked away.
And Izzy kept walking. Enjoying her freedom. Oblivious to the shark that just swam past her.
I set down my basket, and let myself be still, and waited for my heartbeat to return to normal
Twenty minutes later, we met briefly at Izzy’s car. She had oatmeal, apples, a carton of milk, a half pound of sliced turkey, turmeric, and a sprig of parsley. I had nothing. I’d completely forgotten to shop.
“Did it work?” she asked.
“It worked,” I said.
She exhaled — a long, shuddering breath that she’d been holding in for God knows how long — then crawled into the driver’s seat of Adam’s forgettable gray Civic and looked at the ceiling.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
I proceeded to my own car and, once situated, glanced in the rearview mirror, and there it was: that SUV. Dark, mid-size, maybe two years old. It had been in the church lot when I was parked there dropping some clothes into the donation box. Now here it was parked at the far end of the Safeway lot, engine running, facing me.
I sat with that for a moment.
The angle was wrong for them to see my plates. We hadn’t been followed in — I was nearly certain of it. It could be anyone. It probably was anyone. People idle in parking lots all the time for entirely ordinary reasons. Right?
I watched it for ninety seconds. Nobody got out. It didn’t move.
I started the car and pulled out, then angled myself toward the back exit.
In my peripheral vision, I saw that the SUV wasn’t following me.
It just sat there, engine running, staring at the spaces we’d been in.
“Mom?” Isabelle texted. “Where are you? I don’t see you.”
“I’m right here, just leaving the lot,” I said. “We’re good, no worries.”
Isabelle needed to believe this was true, even if I was harboring doubts.
We drove back through town, Isabelle in her gray car about six blocks ahead of me. The afternoon sky, also gray and hazy, was like that fine line between hiding and being safe. A soft, delicate line. Not a fortress.
I had promised my daughter that justice was coming, and I’d meant every word of what I’d said. But that gray space between what I declared to be achievable and what I could actually manifest was vast — it felt like an abyss.
This was going to take everything I had. I could not let Isabelle fall into the void.
Read Overpaint, Chapter 1, here.
Read Overpaint, Chapter 2, here.
Read Overpaint, Chapter 3, here.