When I opened my eyes again, everything I knew and loved had disappeared. The Homelanders were trying to kill me. The police wanted to arrest me for murder. A year of my life seemed to have vanished into thin air. It wasn’t until later that I found out I had taken a drug to wipe out my memory so that the Homelanders couldn’t get the secrets of Waterman’s team out of me.

Before he died-before the Homelanders killed him-Waterman had given me an antidote to the amnesia drug, another drug to make those memories return. They returned, all right, in sudden attacks, that were sometimes accompanied by spasms of terrible, gripping pain. Those “memory attacks” still overwhelmed me sometimes and I dreaded them. But bit by bit, they were giving me back the life I had lost, the truth about myself. I was grateful for that.

The memories I was having now, though-now as I lay on the cell floor-these were different. I felt no pain as I saw the faces of the people I loved-or, that is, the only pain I felt was the pain of being unable to reach out and touch them, to hear their voices, to be with them. Because I had been processed back into prison as a fugitive, I had hardly gotten to see anyone before I was locked away. I was in court just long enough to see Beth and my mother crying as they sat on one of the courtroom benches, to see my father just barely holding himself together beside them, my friends raising fists of encouragement while their eyes registered despair.

Then I was brought here to Abingdon. I was allowed to call my lawyer, but that was it: You had to earn other phone privileges through good behavior. I hadn’t even gotten a visiting day yet so I hadn’t seen any of the people I loved, not really. I felt as if they might as well be on the far side of the moon.