I’ve Spent 16 Years Locked Away Because My Parents Said The Air Would Kill Us. I Just Found Out It Was All A Lie To Hide The Fact That We Were Stolen. How Do I Save My Siblings Before They Catch Me?

I didn’t correct her that this was different, that I’d never been to any school ever. Naen scheduled an extra session to help me prepare a statement for the next court hearing.

She explained, “The judge wanted to hear directly from us about how the isolation affected us and what we needed going forward.”

We sat in her office with a notepad and she asked me questions while I tried to put words to everything. Writing it out made me realize how much normal childhood stuff we’d missed: birthday parties and sleepovers and learning to ride bikes and going to the movies and having friends and playing sports and all the tiny everyday things that make up growing up.

I got angry writing it down—really angry in a way I hadn’t let myself feel before. But then I had to write about the confusing part too, about how I still had feelings for the people who took us.

Naen said, “That was normal and okay that love and betrayal could exist at the same time.”

She helped me write it in a way that was honest about both the damage they caused and the complicated emotions I couldn’t just turn off. The next protective hearing happened two weeks later and we all had to go to the courthouse again.

The judge read through our statements and asked us each directly if we wanted any supervised contact with our captors. My siblings and I had talked about it the night before and we all agreed to say no.

Their attorneys stood up and tried to paint them as loving parents who made mistakes out of fear and mental illness. They showed photos of us at various ages looking happy and healthy, argued that we’d been well cared for and educated.

But the prosecutor presented all the evidence of premeditation: the forged documents and the planning and the stolen identities. The judge looked at everything and extended our custody arrangement with Mrs. Smithon.

When he denied the request for supervised visits I felt this weird mix of relief and guilt. Part of me wanted to see them to understand why they did this, but the bigger part knew I wasn’t ready and might never be.

Maggie met with us after the hearing to explain what happened next. The district attorney had filed formal kidnapping charges along with multiple counts of false imprisonment and child endangerment.

She walked us through what each charge meant and said the case would likely take months or even years to fully resolve through the courts. There would be more hearings and probably a trial eventually.

The legal process moved slowly, but at least it was moving forward toward some kind of justice. She also told us that our biological families were still waiting to meet us whenever we felt ready.

I asked if we could wait a little longer and she said, “That was completely fine that we got to control the timeline for that.”

Six weeks passed and our placement with Mrs. Smithon shifted from temporary to longer term. She officially agreed to keep all four of us as long as we needed, which took away some of the uncertainty.

We settled into routines that felt almost normal: regular bedtimes where we actually chose when to sleep, family dinners where we helped cook and set the table, household chores like taking out trash and doing dishes. Small everyday things that other kids probably took for granted but felt kind of miraculous to us.

I could choose my own clothes each morning from the donations people had sent. I could go outside whenever I wanted, walk around the block or sit in the backyard.

I could open windows and breathe real air and feel sun on my face. My younger brother started smiling more and my sister stopped defending our captors as much.

We were healing slowly in tiny increments. My first day at the public high school arrived and I barely slept the night before.

Mrs. Smithon drove me there early and walked me to the main office where a guidance counselor was waiting. She gave me a map of the building and my class schedule and walked me to my first period classroom.

I managed to find my locker and figure out the combination. I sat through English and history and math without having a panic attack, though my hands shook the whole time.

At lunch I stood in the cafeteria holding my tray and had no idea where to sit or what the rules were. I picked an empty spot at the end of a table and ate quickly with my head down.

A girl with red hair asked if I was new and I managed to say yes and tell her my name. She said, “Welcome.”

And she asked where I transferred from. I said, “It was complicated.”

And she didn’t push. The conversation lasted maybe two minutes but it felt like a huge accomplishment.

By the end of the day I was completely exhausted but also kind of amazed that I’d actually done it. That evening I video chatted with James and told him about navigating the cafeteria and trying to figure out where to sit.

He laughed and said his first day at his school was a disaster too. He’d sat at the wrong table and some seniors told him to move.

He shared more awkward school stories about getting lost and walking into the wrong classroom and forgetting his gym clothes. For a few minutes I felt like a regular teenager talking to a friend about normal teenage problems.

James had this way of making everything seem less scary by reminding me that everyone struggles with this stuff. His perspective helped me see how far I’d actually come in just a few months, from being locked inside to sitting in a real classroom with other kids.

Naen arranged for us to visit a public park under her supervision the following weekend. She drove us there and said, “We could explore for an hour while she stayed on a bench nearby.”

The sensory experience hit me immediately: the smell of cut grass and flowers, the sound of other children laughing and playing on the playground equipment. The feeling of wind moving through my hair and sun warming my skin.

All of it triggered that early memory from before we were taken, the one with sunscreen and grass that I’d thought might be a dream. I walked toward the playground and watched kids climbing on the structures, heard their voices calling to each other.

My younger brother ran to the swings and started pumping his legs. I stood there and started crying—not from sadness exactly, but from this overwhelming release of something I’d been holding in.

Naen came over and asked if I was okay. I nodded and said, “I remembered this remembered being little and free and happy before everything got stolen.”

She said, “That memory was real and precious and I could hold on to it now.”

In my next private counseling session Naen suggested, “I write a letter to the woman I called mom.”

She said, “I didn’t have to send it that it was just for me to process my feelings.”

I sat there with a blank piece of paper for a long time before I started writing. I wrote that part of me still loved her despite the terrible things she did.

I wrote that I was angry about having that love, that it felt like another way she’d messed me up. I told her about the confusion of missing her sometimes even though I knew what she’d done was wrong.

I wrote about the good memories mixed in with the bad ones, how she’d read to us at bedtime and made our favorite foods and celebrated our fake birthdays. I filled three pages before I stopped, my hand cramping.

Naen read it and said, “My feelings didn’t have to make sense right now.”

She explained that healing wasn’t a straight line, that I could be angry and sad and grateful and hurt all at the same time. She said, “The complexity of my emotions was actually a sign of growth that I was learning to hold multiple truths at once.”

A few days later Mrs. Smithon asked what we wanted for dinner, and the question stopped me cold because nobody had ever asked that before. My younger brother suggested tacos and she smiled.

She said, “We could make them together.”

We stood in her kitchen choosing toppings from the store, and I picked things I’d only seen in pictures like sour cream and salsa and about six different kinds of cheese. Mrs. Smithon showed us how to cook the meat and warm the shells and we set everything out on the counter in bowls.

My sister grabbed a shell and started piling things on until it was so full the whole thing split apart and fell on her plate in a messy heap. My younger brother laughed—actually laughed—and it was the first real smile I’d seen on his face in weeks.

We all made our tacos too full and watched them fall apart and somehow that made it better, made it feel normal and silly and good. My sister looked at me while we were eating and said, “It felt good even though she was still mixed up about everything.”

Mrs. Smithon didn’t push or ask questions, just let us have this one normal moment of choosing our own food and making a mess together. Three months after the welfare check I stood in the backyard at night looking up at the stars.

Court cases were still waiting to happen and biological families wanted to meet us and I had years of catching up to do on normal life. But I was breathing real air without any filters or lies.

I was making my own choices about small things like what to eat and when to go outside. I was slowly learning who I actually was under all the fake stories and locked doors.

The fear was still there sitting in my chest. So was something else that felt like cautious hope that maybe we would actually be okay.