Piper’s finally reached out to the brooch, tracing its outline as if confirming its reality.“I put it there,” she said, wonder breaking through the dread in her voice.“The well.I remember—I was running.Always running.The voices told me to leave it there, that it would find its way to someone who needed to find me.”
Mom stepped further into the room, drawn by the change in Piper’s demeanor.“You remember this brooch?”
“Yes.No.It’s coming back in pieces.”Piper took the brooch from Jenna’s palm.“Patricia gave it to me.Said it would protect me.”
“Patricia?”Jenna repeated, her pulse quickening.Was her sister talking about a girl who had come to her in a dream—a girl who had disappeared years ago, and was surely long dead?
“Yes, Patricia Gaines,” Piper replied, her gaze remained fixed on the opal.“At the Lost and Found Collective.She had been there longer than anyone else.She saw something in me—something familiar, she said.The day I left, she pressed this into my hand.Told me to keep it close.”
The memories seemed to be flowing now, gaining momentum like a stream after a long drought.Piper’s face was more animated than Jenna had seen since their reunion, color returning to her cheeks.
“I remember more now,” Piper continued, her voice stronger.“The day I left home.Twenty years ago.I was sixteen, and the voices had been getting worse for months.Telling me terrible things—that I was dangerous, that I would hurt you, hurt Mom and Dad.”Her eyes filled with tears.“They said I had to go, had to disappear.That I should change my name, become someone else entirely.Emma Kirby.They gave me that name.”
“Oh, Piper,” Mom murmured, moving to sit on the other side of the bed, creating a protective circle around her daughter.
“I believed them,” Piper said, the tears spilling over now.“I was so scared, so confused.And eventually...eventually I forgot I was ever Piper Graves.The voices made sure of that.They kept me isolated, kept me running whenever I started to form connections.Years passed—homeless shelters, streets, odd jobs that never lasted.”
“Until you found the Lost and Found Collective?”
“Yes.I was...I don’t know, maybe twenty-six by then?”Piper’s gaze grew distant, remembering.“I saw a flyer on a bulletin board at a bus station.‘Lost your way?Find yourself again.’There was an address, a phone number.I called, and a man named Eliot Lansing answered.He said I could stay as long as I needed, no questions asked.”
“What was it like there?”Mom asked, her voice gentle.
“Peaceful.A working farm—vegetables, some chickens and goats.People living and working together.Everyone had their story, their reasons for being there.No one pushed for details.Patricia was different from the others.Quieter.Watchful.She sought me out the second day, said she’d been waiting for someone like me.”
“Someone with your ability,” Jenna said.
Piper nodded.“She understood what it was like—the voices, the knowing things you shouldn’t know.She’d been experiencing it since she was a child.That’s why she ended up at the collective.”A shadow crossed her face.“But even there, the voices found me.After a week, they started again—warnings, threats.Told me I would bring harm to these people who had shown me kindness.”
“So you left,” Jenna concluded.
“Yes.But Patricia saw me packing.She gave me this brooch—said it was special, that it would guide me to where I needed to be.I wore it for years.”Piper’s expression darkened.“Until the Harvesters found me.”
A chill ran through Jenna at the mention of the human traffickers who had preyed on vulnerable people throughout the Midwest.She had encountered their handiwork during a recent case.
“You were their captive,” she said, the realization sickening her.
“For months.About five or six years ago.”Piper swallowed hard, her grip on the brooch tightening.“Me and four others.They kept moving us around, sometimes at night.They were...collecting people.People without connections, who wouldn’t be missed.”
Mom made a small, wounded sound.“But we missed you.Every day.”
“I didn’t know who I was anymore,” Piper said, turning to her mother with eyes full of regret.“Emma Kirby had been real to me for so long by then.”
“How did you escape?”Jenna asked, steering the conversation back to the facts, trying to piece together the fragments of her sister’s lost years.
“There was a woman—Jill.Another captive.She figured out how to unlock the door when they moved us to a new location.We ran in different directions.I had the brooch with me, hidden in my shoe.But as I ran through Whispering Pines Forest, the voices told me to drop it in the well—that it would find its way to someone who could help me.”A small, wondering smile touched her lips.“And it found you.”
“After you escaped,” Jenna prompted, “you eventually found Wendell Gillis.”
“Yes, though not right away.I wandered for months, afraid the Harvesters would find me again.Then one day about four or five years ago, I felt...pulled.Like an invisible thread was guiding me.I followed it to Wendell’s farm.”Her expression softened at the memory.“He took one look at me and said, ‘I’ve been expecting you.’He knew, somehow.He understood the voices, the visions.For the first time in years, I wasn’t alone in what I experienced.”
The pieces were falling into place now—the twenty-year puzzle of Piper’s disappearance forming a coherent, if heartbreaking, picture.Jenna felt a complex mix of emotions: grief for all her sister had endured, relief at finally understanding, anger at the forces that had kept them apart.
Suddenly, Piper stiffened, the brooch falling to the bedspread.Her eyes went distant, unfocused, her breathing shallow and quick.
“Piper?”Jenna touched her arm, alarmed by the abrupt change.“What is it?”
“Green,” Piper whispered, the word escaping on a breath that seemed dragged from her lungs.“Green is for envy.”
