The Pendant That Stole Everything: How My Parents’ Control Led Me Into a Predator’s Trap

I was sitting in my junior year physics class, but my mind was a million miles away. Mrs. Parker was droning on about the laws of thermodynamics, her voice a monotonous buzz that served as the background music to the movie playing in my head. In that movie, I was free—not just from this classroom, but from everything that made my life feel like a carefully controlled experiment with no room for error.

My name is Indie Barton, and at seventeen years old, I wasn’t just daydreaming about the weekend. I was envisioning a full-scale escape from the cold, sterile laboratory that had become my existence.

The Perfect Storm of Expectations

My mother, Dr. Catherine Barton, is a biology teacher at Millbrook High—the same school I attended, which meant there was no escaping her watchful eye even during school hours. My father, Richard Barton, teaches music at the elementary school across town. Separately, they might have been reasonable parents. Together, they formed a perfect storm of suffocating expectations that made every day feel like I was being slowly crushed under the weight of their combined neuroses.

To my mother, I was a fragile specimen, a project to be monitored and controlled with the same careful attention she gave to the petri dishes in her laboratory. My social life existed in a sterile environment of her own design: no parties unless she’d personally vetted the host family and spoken to the parents about supervision protocols, a strict curfew of 9 PM on weekends and 7 PM on school nights, and a rotating cast of “approved” friends who were as bland and predictable as the diagrams in her biology textbooks.

“Friendship is about quality, not quantity,” she would say whenever I complained about not being able to hang out with kids she deemed “questionable.” “I’m protecting you from influences that could derail your future.”

To my father, I was a vessel for his own unrealized academic ambitions. He had dreamed of being a concert pianist but had settled for teaching elementary school music because, as he constantly reminded me, “real talent requires sacrifice and discipline that most people simply don’t have.” He projected all his disappointed dreams onto me, treating every grade less than an A as a personal failure and every missed homework assignment as a cardinal sin that proved I lacked the discipline required for success.

A B+ on a report card would result in a two-hour lecture about “squandered potential” and “the consequences of mediocrity in a competitive world.” A forgotten assignment would mean grounding, loss of privileges, and disappointed speeches about how I was “throwing away opportunities they had worked so hard to provide.”

At seventeen, I felt less like a daughter and more like a high-stakes science experiment—one they were terrified would spontaneously combust and ruin the pristine reputation they’d spent years cultivating as model parents and respected educators.

The Day Everything Started to Unravel

“Indie Barton,” Mrs. Parker’s voice sliced through my fantasy like a scalpel, sharp and unforgiving. “Since you seem to be in another dimension entirely, perhaps you’d care to explain the concept of entropy to the class?”

The faces of my thirty classmates swiveled in my direction like spotlights finding their target. A hot, prickling wave of shame washed over me, starting at my hairline and flooding down to my toes. I could feel my face burning, my throat closing up, my mind going completely blank.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Parker,” I mumbled, my gaze fixed on a scratch on my desk that suddenly seemed like the most fascinating thing in the world. “I… I’ll be more attentive.”

“See me after class,” she said, her expression unyielding, her tone carrying the weight of impending doom. “And for the record, I’ve already left a message for your mother.”

My heart plummeted into my stomach. A summons to my mother’s court was the last thing I needed. The rest of the class period passed in a blur of anxiety, my mind racing through possible excuses, explanations, anything that might soften the blow of what was coming.

As the final bell rang, I saw her waiting outside the classroom—a statue of maternal disapproval, arms crossed over her chest, lips pressed into a thin, unforgiving line. Other students gave us a wide berth as they passed, sensing the tension radiating from my mother like heat from asphalt in summer.

The car ride home was a masterclass in psychological warfare. She didn’t yell, not at first. That would come later. Instead, she used a tone of deep, wounded disappointment that was far worse than shouting—a weapon she had honed to perfection over seventeen years of parenting.

“Do you have any idea how this makes me look, Indie?” she began, her eyes fixed on the road ahead, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. “Mrs. Parker is my colleague. We have lunch in the same staff room every single day. We serve on the same curriculum committees. And I have to listen to her tell me that my own daughter—my daughter—is off in outer space during her class, completely disengaged, wasting the education we’re providing. It’s humiliating.”

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly, trying to make myself as small as possible in the passenger seat. “I was just tired. I didn’t sleep well last night—”

“Don’t make excuses,” she cut me off. “Tired is what people say when they’re not disciplined enough to manage their time properly. You stay up too late on that phone I never should have let you have. You don’t take your responsibilities seriously. And now you’re embarrassing me in front of my colleagues.”

When we got home, the disappointment morphed into full-blown rage. My father was already there, alerted by text message about the “situation” that required both parents to address. They stood in the kitchen like a unified front, a two-person firing squad aimed directly at me.

“What has gotten into you?” my mother shrieked, her voice echoing off the impeccably clean walls of our silent house. “Are you on drugs? Is that it? Are you sneaking around with boys? Are you trying to ruin your future before it even starts?”

“I’m not on drugs!” I protested, tears starting to stream down my face. “I’m not doing anything wrong! I just zoned out for a minute in class. That’s it. That’s all that happened.”

“That’s all?” my father said, his voice cold and measured in the way that always made my stomach clench. “You disrespect your mother’s colleague, you waste the educational opportunities we work so hard to provide, you demonstrate a complete lack of discipline and focus, and you think that’s ‘all’? Indie, we’ve given you everything. Structure. Guidance. A path to success. And you’re throwing it back in our faces.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. The injustice of it all—being treated like a criminal for having a momentary lapse in attention, for being a normal teenager who sometimes got distracted in boring classes, for not being the perfect robotic daughter they seemed to want—it was too much.

“I hate this!” I screamed, surprising myself with the volume and ferocity of my own voice. “I hate how you treat me like I’m some kind of project instead of a person! I hate how everything I do is wrong! I hate how you don’t trust me at all!”

“You want trust?” my mother shot back. “Then earn it. Show us you’re responsible. Show us you’re not going to throw your life away.”

“I’m not throwing anything away!” I grabbed my backpack from where I’d dropped it by the door. “I just want to be a normal teenager for five minutes without you breathing down my neck about every single thing!”

I shouldered past her and ran out the front door, my vision blurred by tears, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat.

Sanctuary at Kayla’s House

My best friend, Kayla Martinez, lived three blocks away in a neighborhood that felt worlds apart from mine despite the short distance. Her house was always slightly messy, always full of warmth and laughter, always a place where I felt like I could breathe without someone monitoring the depth and frequency of each breath.

Kayla was my only window to a normal teenage life—the kind where you could make mistakes without it becoming a referendum on your entire character, where your parents actually trusted you to make some decisions on your own, where love didn’t come with a thousand conditions and requirements.

“My parents are in Florida for the week visiting my grandparents,” she’d told me earlier that day during lunch. “The house is all yours if you need it. Seriously, Indie. You know you’re always welcome here.”

I texted her from the sidewalk, my hands still shaking from the confrontation: Can I come over? Emergency.

Her response was immediate: Door’s unlocked. Come now.

Her home became my sanctuary that night. We ordered a greasy pepperoni pizza from the place that never checked IDs when delivering, turned up a playlist of angsty indie rock so loud the windows vibrated, and for one glorious, perfect evening, I felt like a normal human being.

“They’re so controlling,” I told Kayla as we sat on her bedroom floor surrounded by pizza boxes and soda cans. “It’s like they can’t stand the idea that I might have my own thoughts or feelings that aren’t exactly what they programmed into me.”

“Your parents are intense,” Kayla agreed, shaking her head. “Like, my parents give me rules and stuff, but they also treat me like I’m a person with a brain. Your mom acts like you’re one bad decision away from complete disaster.”

“That’s exactly it,” I said, feeling validated in a way I never did at home. “She doesn’t trust me at all. And the more she controls everything, the more I want to rebel just to prove I exist as something other than her project.”

I stayed at Kayla’s that night, sleeping on her couch, ignoring the increasingly frantic text messages from my parents demanding I come home immediately. For one night, I wanted to pretend I had autonomy over my own life.

The Confrontation

The next day, my parents showed up at Kayla’s house. They didn’t knock politely and wait for someone to answer. They used the spare key Kayla’s parents had given them years ago—back when our families had been friendlier, before my parents had decided the Martinez family was too “permissive” and “lax about discipline”—and just walked right in.

My mother’s face was a thundercloud, dark and threatening. My father stood behind her, a silent statue of disappointment whose very presence felt like an accusation.

“So this is where you’re hiding,” my mother spat, grabbing me by the arm before I could even stand up from the couch. Her grip was like iron, her fingers digging into my skin hard enough to leave marks. “You think you can just run away from your problems and embarrass this family? You think you can ignore our calls and messages and make us worry ourselves sick?”

“Let go of me!” I cried, trying to wrench my arm free. The pain of her grip was nothing compared to the humiliation of being physically dragged out of my friend’s house like a misbehaving child. “You’re hurting me!”

“You want to talk about hurt?” my father said, finally speaking, his voice low and dangerous. “You hurt us, Indie. You hurt us every time you act like our rules and guidance are some kind of abuse instead of the love and protection they actually are. You’re seventeen years old, not an adult. You live under our roof, and you follow our rules. That’s how families work.”

The argument was ugly—a tornado of accusations and tears and raised voices that ended with my mother physically dragging me out of Kayla’s house while Kayla stood in the doorway looking horrified and helpless.

“I’m so sorry,” I mouthed to her as my mother pushed me toward their car.

Kayla just shook her head, tears in her own eyes, unable to do anything to help.

The Therapist Who Seemed Like a Savior

Back in my room—my pristine, beige prison cell decorated in shades of neutral that my mother had chosen because “bright colors are overstimulating and not conducive to focus”—my mother informed me that my “rebellious phase” was officially over.

I was grounded indefinitely. My phone was confiscated. My laptop would only be available for homework, and even then only under direct supervision. I was to come home immediately after school every day. No friends. No activities. Nothing but school and home until I could “demonstrate that we can trust you again.”

“And one more thing,” she added, her voice still tight with anger. “I’ve made you an appointment. You’re going to see a therapist.”

“I don’t need therapy,” I protested weakly. “I just need you to stop treating me like a prisoner.”

“The appointment is tomorrow after school,” she said, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Dr. Alistair Finch comes highly recommended. He specializes in troubled teenagers and family dynamics. Maybe he can help you understand why your behavior is so destructive.”

His name was Dr. Alistair Finch, and his office was located in a converted Victorian house on the nice side of town—the kind of place that looked more like someone’s cozy home than a medical facility. The waiting room was the opposite of my house: warm colors, soft lighting, plush armchairs, and the gentle scent of lavender that immediately made my tense shoulders relax slightly.

Dr. Finch himself was an older man, probably in his mid-fifties, with kind eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses and a soothing, almost hypnotic voice. He wore cardigans and khakis instead of a formal suit, and his office was filled with books and plants and artwork that made the space feel safe and comfortable.

For the first time in what felt like forever, I felt like an adult was actually listening to me—not just lecturing me, not just telling me everything I was doing wrong, but actually hearing what I was saying.

“It sounds like you feel very trapped, Indie,” he said during our first session, his eyes full of sympathy that made me want to weep with relief. “And it sounds like your parents, in their sincere effort to protect you and guide you toward success, are inadvertently making you feel suffocated. Like you have no room to breathe, no space to be yourself, no autonomy over your own life.”

“Yes,” I said, tears streaming down my face. “That’s exactly it. That’s exactly how I feel.”

“That must be incredibly difficult,” he said gently. “To be seventeen years old—old enough to understand yourself as an individual, old enough to want to make some of your own choices—but still be treated like a child who can’t be trusted with any freedom at all.”

“They don’t trust me at all,” I said, grabbing a tissue from the box he offered. “They act like I’m one bad decision away from ruining my entire life. Like if they’re not controlling every single minute of my day, I’m going to spontaneously become a drug addict or get pregnant or fail out of school.”

“We’re going to work on that,” Dr. Finch said warmly. “We’ll work on helping you develop coping strategies for dealing with the anxiety and frustration you’re feeling. We’ll work on communication techniques you can use with your parents. And most importantly, we’ll work on helping you find a sense of peace and your own personal sense of control, even in circumstances that feel overwhelming.”

I left that first session feeling lighter than I had in months. Finally, someone understood. Finally, I had an ally.

The Hypnosis Sessions

At our third session, Dr. Finch suggested hypnosis as a therapeutic technique.

“It’s a wonderful and highly effective tool for managing anxiety and processing difficult emotions,” he explained in his calm, reassuring way. “Hypnosis allows us to access parts of your subconscious mind where a lot of this stress and anxiety is stored. It will help you relax on a much deeper level than regular talk therapy, and it will help you access your own inner strength and resilience.”

I was nervous about the idea. Hypnosis sounded like something from a movie, not a legitimate medical treatment. But Dr. Finch was a licensed therapist with degrees on his wall and a reputation in the community. My mother had chosen him specifically because he was supposed to be the best. If he thought hypnosis would help, then it probably would.

“Is it safe?” I asked.

“Completely safe,” he assured me. “You’ll be in control the entire time. Hypnosis isn’t about losing control—it’s about gaining a deeper connection with your own mind. All I’m doing is guiding you into a very relaxed state where your subconscious is more accessible. You won’t do anything you don’t want to do, and you won’t reveal anything you don’t want to reveal. It’s simply a tool for deep relaxation and processing.”

“Okay,” I agreed, trusting him completely. “I’ll try it.”

I remember him taking out a silver pendant on a long chain—a simple disc that caught the light and threw little reflections on the walls as it moved. “I just want you to watch the pendant, Indie,” he said, his voice dropping to that low, gentle murmur that always made me feel safe. “And I’m going to count slowly to ten. Just relax and breathe. Let all the tension flow out of your body. You’re safe here. You’re completely safe.”

I remember the pendant swinging back and forth, its rhythmic movement like a lulling tide pulling me out to sea. I remember the soft leather of the chair against my back, the lavender scent in the air, the warmth of the late afternoon sun coming through the window.

I remember him reaching number seven in his countdown.

Then… nothing.

The next thing I knew, I was opening my eyes. The sun had moved across the room. An hour had passed in what felt like the blink of an eye, like someone had simply cut that entire chunk of time out of my experience and spliced my consciousness back together on the other side of the gap.

“How do you feel?” Dr. Finch asked, smiling warmly at me from his chair across the room.

“Good,” I said, genuinely surprised by how true it was. “Really… calm. Like I just had the best nap of my life.”

The knot of anxiety that had permanently resided in my stomach—that tight, twisted feeling that had been my constant companion for as long as I could remember—had completely dissolved. I felt peaceful. Serene. Like someone had turned down the volume on all the noise in my head.

“That’s wonderful,” Dr. Finch said. “That’s exactly what we’re hoping for. How do you feel about doing this again next week?”

“Yes,” I agreed immediately. “Definitely.”

The Changes I Didn’t Understand

The hypnosis sessions continued like this for months. Twice a week, I would walk into Dr. Finch’s office carrying all my stress and anxiety and teenage angst like heavy bags I’d been lugging around. And I would float out an hour later in a strange, happy haze, those bags mysteriously lightened.

My parents were thrilled with the changes they saw in me. The defiant, argumentative daughter who’d been making their lives difficult had been transformed into someone docile, quiet, and compliant. I no longer fought about curfew or pushed back against their rules. I no longer complained about their control. I just… existed. Peacefully. Quietly.

“Dr. Finch is a miracle worker,” my mother told my father one evening when she thought I couldn’t hear. “Whatever he’s doing with her, it’s working. She’s finally becoming the daughter we always knew she could be.”

But there were changes I didn’t understand. Side effects that seemed unrelated to stress reduction or anxiety management.

I started gaining weight. Not gradually, the way people typically do when they’re eating too much or not exercising enough, but suddenly and significantly. A puffy, unfamiliar roundness appeared in my face and my stomach. My jeans stopped fitting. My school uniform skirt had to be let out twice.

“It’s a very common side effect of the antidepressant medication I prescribed,” Dr. Finch explained when I mentioned it during a session—a regular talk therapy session, not one of the hypnosis ones. “Your body is just adjusting to the medication. Weight gain is completely normal during this adjustment period. Don’t worry—it’s temporary. The important thing is that you’re feeling less anxious and more at peace, isn’t it?”

And I was. Despite the weight gain, despite the strangeness of the blackouts during hypnosis, I did feel calmer. More centered. Like I’d finally found some equilibrium in my chaotic life.

The blackouts continued. Every hypnosis session followed the same pattern: I’d remember the beginning—the swinging pendant, the countdown, Dr. Finch’s soothing voice—and then I’d remember the end, waking up feeling peaceful and refreshed. But the middle was just… gone. A complete blank void where an hour of time should have been.

I told myself it was just part of the process. That’s how hypnosis worked, right? You went into a deep, trance-like state where your conscious mind stepped aside and your subconscious took over. The fact that I couldn’t remember what happened during that time just meant the hypnosis was working properly.

The Symptoms That Couldn’t Be Explained

Then other symptoms started. Symptoms that couldn’t be explained by antidepressant side effects or stress or any of the other explanations Dr. Finch offered.

A persistent dizziness that would hit me at random moments, making me grab onto doorframes or desks to steady myself. A strange, fluttering sensation in my abdomen—not painful, exactly, but present. Like something moving inside me. Like butterflies trapped under my skin.

The weight gain accelerated. My clothes became increasingly uncomfortable, tight across my stomach and hips in ways that made me feel like I was inhabiting someone else’s body. I started wearing my father’s oversized sweatshirts to school, hiding my changing shape under layers of baggy clothing.

My friend Kayla was deeply worried. We’d been allowed to resume our friendship after my parents decided I’d been “rehabilitated” by therapy, but she noticed changes in me that troubled her.

“Indie, you’ve changed,” she said one day at lunch, her brow furrowed with genuine concern. “Not just physically—though you have, and I don’t mean that in a mean way. But you seem so… out of it. Like you’re not really here anymore. Like there’s a fog between you and the world. Are you sure you’re okay? Are you sure those therapy sessions are helping?”

“I’m fine,” I said automatically, the words coming out like a recording. “I’m just finding my inner peace. Dr. Finch says I’m making excellent progress.”

But even as I said it, a small voice in the back of my mind was whispering that something was wrong. That the person speaking those words wasn’t quite me—or at least, wasn’t the me I used to be.

The Morning Everything Shattered

One morning in early spring—late April, when the world outside was blooming and beautiful and completely at odds with what was about to happen—I woke up with a sharp, stabbing pain in my lower abdomen.

It was so intense it literally took my breath away, a sensation unlike anything I’d ever experienced. I doubled over in bed, clutching my stomach, gasping for air. The pain came in waves, each one more intense than the last, building to crescendos that made me see stars.

I stumbled out of my room, my face pale and drenched with sweat, my legs barely able to support my weight. My mother was in the kitchen making coffee before school. She saw me and her face went white with a fear that finally broke through her usual sternness.

“Indie?” she said, her voice rising. “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

“Something’s wrong,” I managed to gasp out between waves of pain. “It hurts so bad. Mom, something’s really wrong.”

“That’s it,” she said, abandoning her coffee and grabbing her car keys. “We’re going to the hospital right now.”

In the emergency room at County General, the pain was a relentless, monstrous thing, coming in waves that were so excruciating they made me want to scream. My mother held my hand, and for the first time in years, I saw actual fear in her eyes—not anger at me for causing problems, but genuine terror that something serious was happening to her daughter.

A young doctor with a kind face and tired eyes came to examine me. He asked questions about my medical history, my symptoms, when the pain had started. My mother answered most of them, her voice tight with anxiety.

“I know what this is,” my mother was saying to a nurse, her voice full of desperate certainty. “It has to be her appendix. Appendicitis runs in my family. My sister had hers out when she was sixteen. This is exactly how it presented.”

The doctor gently palpated my swollen, tender stomach. I cried out at even the lightest touch—the pain was that intense. He pressed carefully on different areas, asking me to rate the pain on a scale of one to ten. Everything was a ten. Everything hurt like nothing I’d ever imagined.

Then he did an ultrasound, running the wand across my stomach while watching a screen I couldn’t see from my position on the bed. His expression changed—from clinical assessment to confusion, then to something that looked like horror. He excused himself, came back with another doctor, and they both looked at the screen together, speaking in low voices I couldn’t hear over the sound of my own breathing.

The doctor finished his examination. He looked at me, his kind face now filled with a deep, profound pity that terrified me more than the pain had. Then he looked at my parents, who were standing together on the other side of my bed, my father’s arm around my mother’s shoulders.

“Mr. and Mrs. Barton,” he said, his voice quiet but firm. “Your daughter isn’t sick. She’s in labor.”

The world stopped. The words didn’t compute. They were just sounds—meaningless syllables that my brain couldn’t process into anything that made sense.

“Labor?” my mother shrieked, her voice cracking with confusion and rising hysteria. “What on earth are you talking about? She’s seventeen! She’s a child! She can’t be—”

“I can’t be pregnant,” I whispered, the words a raw cry of disbelief that came from somewhere deep in my chest. My mind was racing, trying to make sense of the impossible. “I’ve never… I haven’t been with anyone. I’m a virgin. This doesn’t make sense. This isn’t possible.”

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said gently, his eyes full of a sorrow that confirmed the horrifying truth. “But you’re fully dilated. You’re about to have a baby, probably within the next few hours. We need to get you to the delivery room immediately.”

The Birth and the Revelation

The hours that followed were a surreal nightmare of pain, confusion, and a horror so absolute it felt like I’d fallen through reality into some parallel universe where impossible things happened.

I gave birth to a healthy, six-pound baby boy at 3:47 PM on April 23rd. The nurses cleaned him up, wrapped him in a blue blanket, and tried to hand him to me. I couldn’t take him. I couldn’t even look at him. My mind was fracturing, trying to understand how this had happened, how I could have been pregnant for nine months without knowing, how I could have given birth to a child I’d never consented to creating.

And then, as I lay in the hospital bed afterward—exhausted, shattered, my body feeling like it had been torn apart and poorly reassembled—the fragmented, confusing pieces of the last nine months began to click into place with sickening clarity.

The blackouts during therapy sessions. The weight gain that Dr. Finch had blamed on medication. The dizziness. The fluttering in my stomach. The way he’d always been so careful to make sure I was deeply hypnotized, so relaxed, so completely unaware.

Dr. Finch.

My parents had sent me to a therapist to fix my “behavioral problems,” and instead they’d delivered me to a predator who had used his medical license and my trust to do something so vile, so unthinkable, that my mind recoiled from the reality of it.

The Investigation

The police came to the hospital that evening. A female detective named Maria Santos sat beside my bed with compassionate but weary eyes—eyes that had clearly seen the worst of humanity and were no longer surprised by anything.

I told her everything. About the therapy sessions, the hypnosis, the blackouts, the weight gain that Dr. Finch had explained away as medication side effects. About how I’d never been with anyone consensually, how I’d been a virgin before these sessions started, how I had no memory of anything happening but now understood with horrible certainty what must have occurred during those blank hours.

When I finished, Detective Santos slid a series of headshots across my bedside table. “Do you recognize any of these men?”

My finger trembled as it hovered over the photos. Most were strangers. But the last one… the last one was him. Dr. Alistair Finch, looking professional and trustworthy in what was probably his official therapist headshot.

“Him,” I said, my voice breaking. “That’s Dr. Finch. That’s my therapist.”

Detective Santos’s jaw tightened. “We’ve been trying to build a case against this man for three years,” she said, her voice grim with barely controlled anger. “You’re not the first victim to come forward. He’s a predator who uses his medical license and the trust of his patients to commit the most vile acts imaginable. He uses hypnosis to assault vulnerable female clients—usually teenagers or young women dealing with anxiety or family problems. They never remember a thing. The hypnosis is too deep, too complete.”

She pulled out a folder and showed me statements from other women—six of them, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-three. All of them had reported similar experiences: blackouts during therapy sessions, unexplained physical symptoms, a sense that something was wrong but no concrete memories to point to what it was.

“Until now, we’ve never had a case strong enough to make charges stick,” Detective Santos continued. “The lack of memory, the lack of physical evidence, the fact that these women willingly went to his office and submitted to hypnosis—defense attorneys have used all of it to create reasonable doubt. But with your testimony, and with the baby as irrefutable DNA evidence… we can finally put him away for a very long time.”

The next few days were a blur of police interviews, victim advocates, lawyers, and medical examinations. They took DNA samples from the baby. They searched Dr. Finch’s office and found a hidden camera he’d used to record his assaults—dozens of videos of women and girls in hypnotic trances while he violated them, kept as trophies of his crimes.

I was in that collection. Three videos of me, unconscious and unaware, while he did things I still can’t bring myself to think about in detail.

The Impossible Decision

I saw my son only once after that initial moment in the delivery room. The nurses brought him to me because they said it was important for bonding, for my emotional recovery. He was beautiful. Perfect. He had a tiny tuft of dark hair and my father’s nose. His little fists waved in the air as he made small, mewling sounds.

But when I looked at him, I didn’t feel a rush of maternal love. I didn’t feel the connection that mothers are supposed to feel with their newborns. All I felt was the cold, horrifying echo of a violation I couldn’t even remember—a violation that had resulted in this tiny, innocent human who deserved so much better than to be born from such darkness.

I was seventeen years old, barely finished with my junior year of high school. My entire future had been stolen from me—not just my innocence or my sense of safety, but my actual future, my plans, everything I’d been working toward. I had college applications to finish. I had a senior year to complete. I had a whole life I was supposed to be living.

I knew, with a certainty that broke my heart into a million irreparable pieces, that I could not be a mother. Not now. Not like this. Not to a child who would forever be a living reminder of the worst thing that had ever happened to me.

It was the most difficult, most agonizing decision of my life, but I made the choice to place my son for adoption. The hospital connected me with an adoption agency that specialized in these situations, and within days they found a couple—Michael and Jennifer Chen—who had been waiting for a child for years.

They came to the hospital to meet me. They were kind people, probably in their mid-thirties, who looked at that baby like he was the most precious thing in the world. They promised me they would love him, protect him, give him every opportunity to have a good life.

I wrote them a long letter to give to my son when he was old enough to understand. I told him that his birth mother loved him very, very much, but that sometimes love means making impossible choices. I told him that none of what happened was his fault, that he was innocent and perfect and deserving of all good things. I told him I hoped he would have a beautiful life full of joy and love and all the things I couldn’t give him.

I signed the adoption papers on my eighteenth birthday—which came just three weeks after giving birth. It felt grimly appropriate, like the universe was marking the transition from childhood to a adulthood I’d never asked for.

The Trial

The trial took place that fall. I had just started my senior year of high school, trying to pretend I was a normal teenager preparing for college, when I had to take days off to sit in a courtroom and testify against the man who had destroyed my life.

Dr. Alistair Finch sat at the defense table in an expensive suit, looking nothing like the kind, grandfatherly therapist who had seemed so trustworthy. He looked at me once—just once—when I took the witness stand, and the coldness in his eyes made me understand that everything about his therapeutic persona had been a carefully crafted lie. He wasn’t a healer. He was a predator who had perfected the art of hunting the most vulnerable prey.

I had to recount every detail I could remember: how my parents had sent me to him for behavioral problems, how he’d suggested hypnosis, how I’d trusted him completely because he was a licensed professional. I had to describe the blackouts, the unexplained pregnancy, the violation I couldn’t remember but knew had occurred.

The hardest part was when they played the videos he’d recorded. The courtroom was cleared of non-essential personnel and the videos weren’t shown publicly, but I had to watch them as part of giving my testimony. I had to watch myself—unconscious, defenseless, completely unaware—while he assaulted me.

I threw up twice during that testimony. The judge called a recess. My mother held me in the bathroom while I sobbed, both of us destroyed by what we’d seen.

But I finished my testimony. For myself, for the other victims whose voices needed to be heard, for every vulnerable girl who might walk into his office in the future if we didn’t stop him.

The other victims testified too. Women who’d been too afraid to come forward before, who’d doubted their own experiences, who’d been told by previous investigators that there wasn’t enough evidence. Now, with the videos and the DNA evidence from my baby, the case was ironclad.