I was at a family gathering when my mom asked, “Are you excited to turn 23?” My entire body tensed up.

You see, in every generation of my family, someone dies on their 23rd birthday. First, it was my great-grandfather. Then my grandmother’s sister. Then my mom’s cousin. I’m not superstitious, but no one ever had a good explanation for it, and nobody in our family could say the word “coincidence” without their voice going thin.

Fast forward three months later, and I was walking to work when a car jumped the curb right where I’d been standing seconds before. The only reason it missed me was because I’d paused to adjust my bag and take a step back. That night, at 2 a.m., I couldn’t sleep. I Googled my family history and found seven deaths that all happened at age 23.

I went to visit my great-aunt Helen, the only one still alive who remembered the older ones. But the second I mentioned the deaths, her face froze.

“Why are you digging into this?” she asked, not looking at me.

I told her my birthday was coming up, and she finally turned around. Her face went pale.

“They all died between 3:00 and 4:00 in the afternoon,” she whispered. “We stopped having birthday parties because of it.”

She wouldn’t say anything else. She kept her hands busy with nothing—straightening a doily that was already straight, wiping a counter that was already clean—like stillness would make her remember too much.

And when the day finally came, I told everyone I wanted to be alone. I deadbolted the door.

The morning of my 23rd birthday, I sat on my couch watching the clock. 10:00 a.m. passed, then noon. At 2:30, I was actually starting to relax, thinking maybe I was being ridiculous. I told myself I’d gotten inside my own head. I told myself my aunt’s fear had infected me. At 2:47, someone knocked on my door.

I figured it was UPS with a package, so I looked through the peephole.

“Who is it?” I called through the door.

“I’m looking for Carolyn,” he said. His voice was flat, emotionless.

“Wrong apartment,” I said. “There’s no Carolyn here.”

I started to move away from the door, but he knocked again—harder.

“Please. I know she’s in there. I need to speak with Carolyn.”

My hands were sweating as I put the chain on and opened the door just a crack. The moment he saw me, his jaw dropped.

“Your eyes,” he said, stepping closer. “You have Caroline’s eyes.”

His right hand was in his coat pocket, and I could see the outline through the fabric.

“You’re going to tell me where Caroline is,” he said.

I slammed the door so hard the wall shook.

Boom, boom, boom.

He started slamming his fist against the door. “I know you’re in there. I can wait. You have to come out eventually.”

I called 911, barely able to hold my phone steady, and told the dispatcher someone was trying to break in. Another slam, and the chain lock ripped partially out of the frame, screws clattering to the floor. The pounding continued as I talked to the dispatcher, my voice cracking, my eyes fixed on the door like it might split in two.

But the second we both heard sirens approaching, it stopped. Complete silence.

The cops found nothing. No fingerprints on the door, and none of my neighbors saw anyone in the hallway. They looked at me like I was having a breakdown, like maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. I spent the rest of my birthday in that barricaded apartment, jumping at every sound, but nothing else happened.

I survived.

Up until the day of my sister’s 23rd birthday, I actually thought I’d broken whatever sick pattern this was. I stopped taking medication after that, thinking it was why I’d been so paranoid over nothing.

When my sister and I were planning her birthday party, I told her about my experience, and we laughed about how crazy I’d been.

I was in a meeting when my mom called. I finally stepped out to answer, and she was sobbing so hard I couldn’t understand her.

“Mom,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Can you hear me?”

“Your sister,” she choked out. “She… she collapsed at work.”

Turns out she had a brain aneurysm. They pronounced her dead at 3:23 p.m. on her 23rd birthday.

At the funeral, none of my relatives would look me in the eye. My aunt pulled me aside and said my sister had mentioned getting weird emails the week before. Someone asking about someone named Caroline, but she thought it was spam and deleted them.

I instantly knew it was supposed to be me.

Fast forward a year later, to her 24th birthday. I was alone at the cemetery at 3:23 p.m. when I heard footsteps behind me.

“You’re the one who survived,” the woman said.

She knew about the man at my door. She knew about Carolyn. She knew everything.

And when she finally explained what was going on, everything clicked.

She pulled out an old photo from her pocket and handed it to me. There was my mom, younger, with darker hair, standing next to this woman. On the back, someone had written, Caroline and Luna, 1999, in faded blue ink.

My legs felt weak as she started explaining that Caroline was my mom’s real name before she changed it 24 years ago. She’d been running from someone dangerous—someone who wanted her dead for what she did to him.

The curse wasn’t some family mystery or bad luck. It was a man who’d been hunting our family for decades. He was killing us at 23 because that’s the exact age my mom was when she ran away and started her new life.

My stomach turned as the pieces fell into place. My sister dying for something that happened before we were even born.

The woman introduced herself as Luna Carver. She said she was my mom’s best friend back then, the one who helped her disappear. She helped create all the fake documents, found her a new town to live in, taught her how to become someone else completely.

Luna pointed to the graves around us and said the man at my door on my birthday was probably Seth Robertson. He was a private investigator. The real threat paid to track down family members who might lead back to Caroline.

Luna told me she’d been watching our family for years, trying to protect us without revealing herself or bringing more attention to us. She showed me photos on her phone of a man in his 40s with gray hair outside my apartment building.

“That was Seth,” she said.

She said he’d been following me for weeks before my birthday, learning my schedule.

I left the cemetery right then and drove straight to my mom’s house, my hands shaking so badly I could barely grip the wheel. The whole drive, I kept thinking about my sister—how she died for nothing, for someone else’s past.

When I got there and knocked on the door, Mom opened it, saw my face, and just knew. I held up the photo Luna gave me and watched her face go completely white.

“Where did she get that?” she whispered.

I pushed past her into the house. I told her I knew about Caroline, I knew about everything, and she started crying, begging me to let it stay buried. She kept saying it was better if I didn’t know, that knowing would only make things worse for everyone.

But I wasn’t leaving without answers. Not after my sister died because of her secrets.

Mom finally sat down at the kitchen table and told me she testified against a very dangerous man when she was 23. She was the only witness brave enough to come forward after he killed three people, including her roommate. Her testimony sent him to prison for what was supposed to be life.

And he swore in the courtroom he’d kill her. Not just her, but any children she ever had, and he’d wait until they were 23—the same age she was when she betrayed him.

When I asked his name, she shook her head and grabbed a piece of paper from the drawer. She wrote something down with a shaking hand, showed it to me for two seconds, then burned it over the sink.

She said speaking his name out loud might somehow bring him closer, like he had people listening everywhere.

She thought changing her name and moving across the country would be enough to keep us safe from him. She’d been so careful for so many years—never posting photos online, never joining social media, always paying cash.

But somehow they found us anyway, and now my sister was dead because of it.

I suddenly understood why great-aunt Helen had been so scared when I asked about the family deaths. She knew Mom’s real identity, knew about Caroline, and that made her a target too.

All those relatives who died at 23—they were the ones who knew the truth about where Carolyn went. Someone had been systematically eliminating anyone who could reveal Mom’s new identity and location over the years.

Luna came to the house an hour later with a folder full of newspaper clippings about the original trial. The headlines were from 1999, talking about a brutal triple murder and the brave young woman who testified.

The man my mom testified against had been convicted of multiple murders, but got out on a technicality after 15 years. Some evidence had been mishandled, and his expensive lawyers found a way to get the whole thing thrown out.

He walked out of prison five years ago with his fortune intact and started his revenge plan immediately.

Luna explained he’d been using his wealth to hire people like Seth Robertson to track down everyone connected to the trial. They’d find family members, follow them, learn about their children, and wait for the perfect moment to strike.

The deaths in our family weren’t coincidences or accidents. They were targeted hits made to look natural. The car that jumped the curb when I was walking to work. The brain aneurysm that killed my sister. All of it was planned.

Mom broke down completely and admitted she’d been getting threatening messages from months before my sister died. Anonymous emails with old photos of her as Caroline. Text messages from random numbers saying they knew where she lived.

She thought if she ignored them and didn’t engage, they’d give up and move on to someone else. She never imagined they’d go after us kids. Thought the threats were just to scare her into running again.

But she was wrong.

Now my sister was dead, and I was supposed to be dead too.

My whole body was shaking as I stood there in Mom’s kitchen, looking at her crying at the table. I wanted to scream at her for keeping this secret, for not warning us, for letting my sister walk around not knowing she was in danger. My fists were clenched so tight my nails dug into my palms.

Luna must have seen how mad I was because she stepped between us and put her hand on my shoulder. She told me that warning us might have made things worse, that these people watch for any sign their targets know about them.

Mom had gone to a security expert years ago who told her the best thing was to act normal—never let on she knew about the threats. The expert said if she told us kids, we might panic or do something that would tip them off and make them strike faster.

I pushed past Luna and grabbed Mom’s laptop from the counter. My fingers flew across the keyboard as I logged into my sister’s Facebook account using the password she’d given me years ago.

Luna leaned over my shoulder as I scrolled through her messages from the weeks before she died. There it was, in her message requests: someone named Marcus Henderson saying he was researching our family tree for a genealogy project.

My sister had replied to him three weeks before her birthday, sending him photos of our family reunions and telling him about where we lived and worked. The profile picture was some random old man, but Luna said it was probably Seth Robertson using a fake account.

She pulled out her own laptop and started showing me website after website where our information was just sitting there for anyone to buy.

Property records showed Mom’s address and how much she paid for the house. Voter registration had our full names and birthdays. Those stupid people-finder sites had our phone numbers and email addresses and even listed our relatives.

Every time we updated our LinkedIn profiles or posted on Instagram, we were basically drawing them a map straight to us.

Luna opened another folder on her computer and my stomach dropped. She had medical reports from three other families connected to the original trial—families where young people died from sudden brain bleeding or organ failure.

The symptoms matched what happened to my sister perfectly.

There was this drug that could trigger bleeding in the brain if you had certain genes, and it broke down in the body so fast that normal toxicology tests wouldn’t find it unless you knew exactly what to look for.

My hands were shaking as I read about a girl in Ohio who collapsed at her job just like my sister. Another one in Texas who died during her birthday dinner.

Luna had been tracking these deaths for years, building evidence that they weren’t natural.

We drove to the police station that afternoon with a box full of Luna’s files and printouts. The detective listened to us for about ten minutes before holding up his hand.

He said without concrete proof of murder—without the actual drug in someone’s system, or video of someone poisoning them—there was nothing he could do. These were all just coincidences as far as the law was concerned.

He suggested we hire private security if we were really worried and maybe think about moving somewhere else.

Mom slammed her hand on his desk and said she wasn’t running anymore. She’d been running for 20 years, changing her name, never staying in one place too long until she met my dad and decided to try for a normal life.

She was tired of being scared every time someone knocked on the door or a car drove by too slow.

But even as she said it, I could see her hands shaking.

Luna made a call from the parking lot, and 20 minutes later we were sitting in a coffee shop with Samuel Gates—this older guy in a fancy suit who specialized in stalking cases and witness-protection issues.

He took notes while we talked and said he’d start working on restraining orders right away. But he was honest that they were basically just pieces of paper if someone was determined enough to kill people and make it look natural.

A court order wasn’t going to stop them.

He said we needed to document everything—save every email and message, record any strange encounters.

That night, my phone rang from a blocked number. I almost didn’t answer, but something made me pick up.

For a few seconds, there was just breathing on the other end. Then a man’s voice said two words before hanging up.

“Caroline’s daughter.”

My whole body went cold. They knew exactly who I was now.

The next morning, a van pulled up and two guys started installing cameras on every corner of Mom’s house. We changed all the locks to heavy-duty ones that couldn’t be picked. The security company put sensors on every window and door that would alert us if anything opened.

But even with all that, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching us. Every car that slowed down as it passed made my heart race. Every person walking their dog could be someone gathering information. Every delivery driver could be another investigator in disguise.

Samuel called us a week later with more bad news. He’d been digging into the financial side and discovered the man who wanted us dead had been using cryptocurrency to pay people like Seth Robertson.

The money moved through so many digital wallets and exchanges that it was basically impossible to trace. He’d learned from his mistakes in prison and studied how to hide his tracks better. There were no bank records to subpoena, no paper trail to follow.

The payments could be coming from anywhere in the world and going to anyone with a Bitcoin wallet.

Three days later, Mom asked me to come over and said she needed to show me something important. She took me to her bedroom closet and moved a pile of old sweaters to reveal a small safe I’d never seen before.

Her hands shook as she entered the combination and pulled out stacks of cash wrapped in rubber bands—maybe $30,000 total. She’d been putting away money for 15 years, $20 here, $50 there, always cash from grocery money or selling things online, preparing for the day she might have to run again.

She pushed the stacks toward me and told me to take it all and disappear before they found me too.

But I pushed it back and said I wasn’t leaving her alone to face this.

Luna came by the next morning with three bankers’ boxes she’d been keeping in a storage unit across town. She spread photos across Mom’s dining table, and I felt sick looking at them.

There was Seth Robertson at the grocery store two blocks from our house three weeks before my sister died. Another photo showed him at the coffee shop where my sister went every morning before work.

Luna had been following him for months, documenting everywhere he went, building evidence that he was stalking our family.

But when she’d taken everything to the police, they said photos of someone shopping weren’t proof of anything illegal.

She pulled out more files and showed us newspaper clippings from three other families who had been connected to the original trial as witnesses or jury members.

The Hendersons in Michigan lost their daughter at 23 to a sudden heart attack, even though she was a marathon runner with no health problems. The Washingtons in Georgia had their son die in a freak accident at work when a shelf collapsed on him on his 23rd birthday.

Two families had already lost kids, and Luna said there was at least one more family out there still being hunted.

I found the Henderson family on social media and sent them a message explaining who I was and asking if we could talk. The response came within an hour, and we set up a video call that afternoon.

They told me they’d hired a company called Executive Protection Services that specialized in keeping people safe from stalkers, and had former FBI agents on staff. They’d been paying $8,000 a month for two years to have security check their house every day and follow their remaining kids to school and work.

The dad had to take a second mortgage on their house, and the mom was working three jobs, but they said it was worth it because their other kids were still alive.

Mom finally sat down with me and Luna that night and told us everything about the trial she’d been avoiding talking about for 20 years.

Her roommate, Jennifer, had been dating this man who seemed charming at first, but got more controlling over time. When Jennifer tried to break up with him, he showed up at their apartment with a knife.

Mom was hiding in the bedroom closet and heard everything—heard Jennifer begging for her life, heard sounds that still gave her nightmares.

And when the police came, Mom was the only witness willing to testify because everyone else was too scared of what his family might do.

She spent three years in witness protection, living in different motels and safe houses before deciding she couldn’t live like that anymore and wanted to try having a normal life with a new identity.

Samuel called us the next day saying he’d found something in federal law that might help. If we could prove a pattern of ongoing harassment and threats across state lines, it became a federal crime that the FBI would have to investigate.

He set up a shared online folder where we started uploading everything—every weird phone call, every time we saw someone watching the house, every car that followed us for more than two blocks—building a paper trail that couldn’t be ignored.

Two days later, I opened my email and found a message with no subject line from an address that was just random numbers and letters. The message had 12 photos of me taken from outside my apartment at different times over the past month.

Me carrying groceries. Me checking my mail. Me leaving for work.

And the text just said 23 over and over again, filling the whole screen.

I forwarded it to Samuel, and he said it was good evidence, but it also meant they were escalating their intimidation tactics and we needed to be more careful.

Luna had been doing her own investigation and discovered Seth Robertson had been using the name Mike Jun to get a job at Quick Ship Delivery Service six months ago—the same company that delivered packages to our neighborhood every day.

She’d followed him on his route and watched him slow down outside our houses, taking photos with his phone, learning when we were home and when we left for work.

We decided to confront him the next morning when he showed up for his shift at the delivery warehouse. Mom stayed in the car while Luna and I walked up to him as he was loading his truck.

Luna said we knew who he really was and what he was doing.

He stopped loading boxes and turned around with this calm smile on his face, like he’d been expecting us.

He said we couldn’t prove anything, and even if we could, his employer was very patient and had all the time in the world to wait for the right opportunity.

He told us we could watch our backs every second of every day, but eventually we’d make a mistake, get comfortable, forget to check the locks.

“And that’s when they’ll finish what they started,” he said.

Luna was recording everything on her phone, but he didn’t seem to care. He just got in his truck and drove away like we’d been discussing the weather.

That night around 2:00 in the morning, I heard glass breaking and ran outside to find my car window smashed.

A photo lay on the driver’s seat. It was a picture of my sister’s grave with fresh flowers on it—flowers I hadn’t put there. Someone had written on the back that they could get to us whenever they wanted, that we were just postponing the inevitable.

Mom spent the next three hours on the phone with the U.S. Marshals Service trying to get back into witness protection. I sat next to her listening to her voice get more and more desperate as they transferred her from one office to another.

She kept explaining about the threats in the photo and my sister’s death, but they kept saying the same thing: once you leave the program voluntarily, you can’t come back unless there’s a new credible threat to your life that meets specific criteria.

The guy on the phone said, “Harassment doesn’t count, and neither do vague threats.” They needed proof someone was actively trying to kill her right now, not just scare her.

Mom hung up and threw the phone across the room, where it cracked against the wall.

Samuel suggested we hire someone to help us figure out how they kept finding us. He knew this researcher named Tristan Beck, who specialized in genealogy and tracking down missing people.

I called Tristan that afternoon, and he came to the house with two laptops and a stack of papers. He spent four hours going through our social media, public records, and data broker sites while we watched.

Every time he found our information somewhere new, he’d show us the screen and explain how anyone with $50 could buy our addresses, phone numbers, and relatives’ names.

He found our data in 12 different breaches from companies we’d never even heard of—credit monitoring services, grocery store loyalty programs. Even my gym membership had been hacked and our information sold online.

Tristan kept digging and found something that made him stop typing. He pulled up a chart showing all the family members who died at 23 and started drawing lines between them.

Every single one had been to Mom’s wedding or her baby shower or some event where they would have heard her real name mentioned.

Great-aunt Helen had been her maid of honor. The cousin who died had helped her move into her first apartment.

They weren’t random family members at all. They were the ones who knew about Caroline.

Samuel called us the next morning saying he’d gotten a judge to sign a restraining order against Seth Robertson. The cops went to serve it at his apartment, but the place was completely empty—not just moved-out empty, but like nobody had ever lived there.

The landlord said Seth had paid six months’ rent in cash up front and never caused any problems. The neighbors couldn’t even describe what he looked like.

Luna drove by his fake job at the delivery company, and they said Mike Jun hadn’t shown up for three days and they’d already hired someone new.

Two weeks later, my neighbor knocked on my door, asking if I knew some woman who’d been asking about me. She was going door to door with a clipboard, pretending to do a survey about neighborhood safety.

My neighbor thought it was weird because she kept asking specific questions about our family and when we were usually home.

Luna looked at the description and recognized her from another case she’d worked on.

“These people have a whole network,” she said. “They rotate investigators so nobody gets too familiar.”

I decided I was done hiding and being afraid all the time. I wrote up everything that had happened and posted it on Facebook and Twitter and Reddit.

I named names, posted the photos they’d sent, included screenshots of the emails. I wanted everyone to know what was happening to us.

Samuel called within an hour telling me to take it down. He said going public could make us bigger targets or inspire copycats who wanted attention.

But I refused. I was tired of being hunted in the dark.

The post started getting shared, and within a day it had thousands of views. My phone wouldn’t stop ringing with reporters wanting to interview us. A local news station showed up at the house.

Mom locked herself in a room and wouldn’t come out. She kept saying the attention would make everything worse.

But I thought maybe being in the spotlight would protect us. If everyone was watching, they couldn’t just make us disappear.

Three days after the story went viral, I got a call from someone saying they were a federal prosecutor. At first I thought it was another reporter, but then they mentioned details that weren’t in my posts.

They knew about the trial 20 years ago and the other families being targeted. They’d been building a RICO case against the man who wanted Mom dead, but they needed more evidence.

Our situation might be exactly what they needed to finally put him away.

We met with the prosecutor and two FBI agents at Samuel’s office. They showed us files on this man going back 30 years. He’d been suspected in dozens of crimes, but they could never get enough evidence.

They said if we cooperated with their investigation, they could offer us federal protection. It wasn’t full witness protection, but they’d have agents check on us regularly and monitor our communications.

We agreed immediately.

The protection turned out to be an agent driving by the house twice a day and calling once a week to make sure we were okay. It was better than nothing, but I still couldn’t sleep.

Every car that slowed down made me grab my phone. Every knock at the door made my heart race.

A month later, I got an email from someone named Kayla Freeman. She said she was the nurse who’d been with my sister when she died.

She’d been thinking about it ever since, and something didn’t feel right. My sister had mentioned feeling dizzy for days before the aneurysm. She’d also told Kayla that she kept seeing the same car following her to work.

Kayla said my sister had seemed scared but tried to laugh it off.

Kayla asked if we could meet in person because she had something she needed to show us that she couldn’t talk about over the phone.

We met at a coffee shop downtown, and she kept looking around like someone might be watching. She pulled out a small cooler from her bag and slid it across the table to me.

Inside were three vials with my sister’s name on them.

She’d saved blood samples from my sister against hospital rules because the whole thing felt wrong to her. The hospital would fire her if they found out, but she said she couldn’t shake the feeling that something had been done to my sister.

We took the samples to a private lab Luna knew about—one that wouldn’t ask too many questions about where they came from. The chain of custody was broken, so it wouldn’t hold up in court, but we just needed to know what happened.

Two weeks later, the results came back, and I threw up when I read them.

They found traces of a rare compound that can trigger aneurysms in people with certain genetic markers. The toxicologist said it was almost impossible to detect unless you were specifically looking for it.

It wasn’t enough for a murder charge since we couldn’t prove how it got in her system, but now we knew for sure that someone had poisoned my sister.

I got myself tested the next day and found out I have the exact same genetic marker my sister had.

The doctor explained that this compound would have killed me too if I’d been exposed to it.

Luna said the only reason I survived my birthday was probably because Seth couldn’t get close enough to dose me. That man at my door had scared him off by being too aggressive.

My sister hadn’t been so lucky because she’d been talking to him online, thinking he was family.

Luna started making calls, and within a week she’d set up a meeting with other people whose families had been targeted by the same man over the years.

There were 12 of us in that first meeting—survivors or family members of victims. One woman had lost her brother ten years ago to a supposed heart attack at age 32. Another guy’s father had died in a car accident that the cops said was mechanical failure, but he’d always suspected something else.

We started meeting every week, sharing information and watching out for each other.

One of the survivors—a woman whose daughter had been killed five years earlier—told us how she’d fought back. She’d hired a forensic accountant to dig into the man’s finances and found multiple shell companies he was using to hide money.

She reported everything to the IRS and got several of his businesses audited. It didn’t stop him completely, but it cost him millions and slowed him down for a while.

She gave us the accountant’s contact information and said he’d help us for free since he hated what this man had done.

Mom was falling apart from the stress, so I found us a therapist who specialized in stalking victims.

The first session, Mom just cried for the entire hour while I held her hand. The therapist gave us safety plans to follow—varying our routes, staying alert, setting up code words with trusted friends—and helped us understand that the constant fear we felt was normal given what we were going through.

She taught us breathing exercises for the panic attacks, and slowly Mom started sleeping more than two hours a night.

Samuel called with bad news about the federal case. The witness who was supposed to testify about the man’s money laundering had disappeared three days before the grand jury.

His apartment was cleaned out and his phone was disconnected. The prosecutor thought he’d either been paid off or scared into running.

Samuel said this showed how much reach the man still had, even with the feds watching him. Without that witness, the RICO case was weaker—but not dead.

I signed up for self-defense classes at a gym Luna recommended. The instructor was a former cop who’d worked stalking cases and understood why I was there. I learned how to get free, how to protect myself, and how to stop feeling helpless every time I had to leave the house.

I also got licensed to carry pepper spray. I knew it wouldn’t stop someone truly determined, but having it in my pocket made me feel like I wasn’t walking out the door empty-handed.

Through the support group, we found out Mom’s old witness protection handler had retired to Florida five years ago. One of the other members knew someone who knew someone and got us his number.

When we called, he remembered Mom immediately and said he’d always worried about her after she left the program.

He couldn’t officially help us since he was retired, but he agreed to meet us off the record.

We flew down to Florida and met him at a beach bar where no one would recognize us. He looked older, but his eyes were still sharp, constantly scanning the room.

He told us the program had flagged Mom’s case as high-risk even back then, but she’d insisted on leaving once the man went to prison.

He walked us through the brutal reality of disappearing properly—cutting traces, avoiding patterns, staying off social media, and treating your own life like something you had to rebuild from scratch if the threat ever got close again.

We practiced the plan, going through each step until we could do it without thinking. Mom memorized the list of documents we’d need, and I mapped escape routes from our house, my work, and anywhere else we went regularly.

We opened new bank accounts under Mom’s maiden name and started keeping cash hidden in different places.

The handler said we might never need to run, but if we did, we’d have maybe an hour before they realized we were gone—and we needed to make that hour count.

Three days later, Luna called me at work with news that made me drop my coffee mug.

Seth Robertson had been arrested in Nevada on drug charges after a traffic stop found meth in his car. The cops ran his prints and found warrants in three other states for fraud and assault.

Luna said he’d make bail, but it would take at least a week to process everything.

I drove straight to Mom’s house and found her packing boxes in the living room. She’d already decided we should live together for safety and was boxing up my old room to make space for my stuff.

That weekend, I moved back home with two suitcases and my laptop. We spent the next three days turning the house into a fortress.

Mom had already ordered security cameras online, and they arrived in huge boxes. I spent hours drilling holes and running cables while Mom programmed the system on her computer.

We put cameras on every corner of the house, pointing at the driveway, the backyard, and both side yards. The doorbell camera could see anyone who walked up the front steps.

We replaced all the regular door locks with heavy deadbolts that the locksmith said would take serious tools to break. The windows got special locks that stopped them from opening more than four inches.

Mom wanted bars on the windows, but I convinced her that was too much. We did get motion-sensor lights for the whole yard. They were so sensitive that every cat that walked through set them off.

The alarm system cost $2,000, but Mom didn’t care about the money anymore. It had door sensors, window sensors, glass-break detectors, and panic buttons in every room.

The company gave us little key fobs that would call the cops if we pressed the button three times.

Through the support group chat, we found out other families were doing the same thing. One family in Ohio had spent $10,000 on security upgrades. Another family in Texas had moved to a gated community with armed guards.

Everyone was sharing what worked and what didn’t. Someone suggested we pool money for shared resources, and within two days we had 15 families contributing.

The fund helped pay for security systems for families who couldn’t afford them. It also paid for a lawyer to give us legal advice about restraining orders and self-defense laws.

One woman used the fund to move her family to a safer neighborhood after someone broke into their garage.

A week after the fund started, I got an email from a journalist named Julia Richmond. She’d been investigating the original trial for a documentary and found some disturbing patterns.

She wanted to meet in person, but only in a public place.

We met at a busy coffee shop downtown where she showed me a folder full of death certificates: seven people who were supposed to testify at the original trial had died before they could take the stand.

Three car accidents, two suicides, one drowning, and one unsolved murder.

The dates were spread over two years, but Julia had connected them all to the case. She had police reports showing that investigators had questions about every single death, but couldn’t prove anything.

One witness had called the cops the night before he died, saying someone was following him. Another had left a note saying she was scared, but didn’t say of what.

Julia had been tracking down family members of the dead witnesses, and three of them told her their relatives had mentioned getting threats.

She showed me photo copies of old letters, the paper yellow with age, all with the same message about keeping quiet.

Samuel was excited when I told him about Julia’s research. He said it could help establish a pattern of behavior for our civil suit.

Within two days, he filed the paperwork suing the man for harassment, stalking, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

We knew the man had hidden his money in offshore accounts and shell companies, so we’d never see a penny. But Samuel said the point was to get everything on the legal record and force him to respond.

The man’s lawyers fought the suit hard, filing motion after motion to get it thrown out. They said we had no proof of any connection between their client and recent events.

But the judge allowed it to move forward because of the pattern Julia had documented.

Three weeks later, we had to do depositions. The man would appear by video from prison while his lawyer sat in the room with us.

Mom hadn’t seen him in over 20 years, and she was shaking when we walked into the conference room. Samuel held her hand while the tech people set up the video link.

When the screen turned on and his face appeared, Mom made a sound like all the air left her body.

He looked older, but his eyes were the same—cold and flat.

He stared right at Mom through the camera and smiled this tiny smile.

“Hello, Caroline,” he said.

Mom started crying.

The lawyer objected, but the damage was done.

Mom couldn’t stop shaking and had to leave the room twice to get sick. But when she came back the third time, something had changed. Her face was hard and her hands were steady.

She looked right at the screen and said she wasn’t afraid anymore.

The deposition went on for four hours with his lawyer trying to trip us up. But Mom answered every question clearly, describing the threats from decades ago and the fear she’d lived with.

When it was over, Mom told Samuel she wanted to go public with everything. She was done hiding and wanted the world to know what this man had done.

Julia was thrilled when we agreed to participate in her investigation. She’d already interviewed six other families and had boxes of documents.

We spent three days at Julia’s office going through everything, scanning old photos and papers. Mom recorded eight hours of interviews, telling the whole story from the beginning.

Julia’s article came out two weeks later on the front page of the Sunday paper. The headline read, “Decades of death: How one man’s revenge destroyed multiple families.”

It had photos of all the victims, timelines showing the patterns, and quotes from 15 different families. The online version included documents and audio clips.

Within hours, it had been shared thousands of times.

My phone started ringing nonstop with reporters wanting to follow up. Three more families contacted Julia after reading the article, saying they’d lost relatives the same way.

The FBI agent assigned to our case called the next morning saying the article had given them what they needed.

The publicity had brought forward two witnesses who’d been too scared to talk before. One had recordings of phone calls where the man discussed having people killed.

By that afternoon, federal agents had arrested him on RICO charges that could mean life in prison.

But Luna warned us his network was still active.

Seth Robertson had made bail and disappeared—probably warning others. The man had used dozens of people over the years, and they were still out there.

Some might want revenge for their boss going down. Others might be looking to collect on jobs they’d already been paid for.

We couldn’t let our guard down just because the main threat was locked up.

The other families felt the same way, and our group chat was full of people reporting suspicious activity. One family in Chicago said a van had been parked outside their house for three days straight.

Samuel filed papers for the trial that morning and said we’d have to testify in six months.

Mom’s hands shook when she signed the witness forms, but she kept writing anyway.

The support group meetings moved from my living room to a community center when 40 more families joined us after the newspaper article.

We printed flyers with warning signs to watch for and passed them out at every meeting. Luna helped us file for nonprofit status so we could get funding to help families with security costs.

I went back to my office job, but parked in different spots every day and took the stairs instead of the elevator.

My coworkers thought I was paranoid when I checked under my car before getting in, but I didn’t care.

Mom met someone named Jerome at the support group, whose wife had been killed by her stalker five years ago. They started getting coffee after meetings, and I saw Mom smile for real for the first time since my sister died.

The federal prosecutor called every week with updates and said they had enough evidence to put him away forever.

Three months passed with us all checking in daily and sharing any weird stuff we noticed.

Mom and Jerome were going to dinner twice a week, and she even let him come to our security check meetings. The trial date got pushed back twice because his lawyers kept filing motions, but Samuel said that was normal.

I installed three more cameras at Mom’s house and taught her how to use pepper spray properly.

Our organization grew to 200 families, and we started a website with resources and emergency contacts.

Local news did a follow-up story showing how we were helping people, and donations started coming in.

Mom told me Jerome made her feel safe again, and I was happy she found someone who understood what we’d been through.

The trial finally started, and we sat in the courtroom watching them bring him in wearing shackles.

Mom grabbed my hand when he looked at us, but she didn’t look away this time.

I testified for three hours about my birthday and what happened to my sister.

Mom testified the next day and told them everything about being Caroline and running for 20 years.

The jury took two days to come back with guilty verdicts on all charges.

When the judge read life without parole, the man stared at Mom and mouthed “Carolyn,” but she just stared back without flinching.

We organized a memorial for my sister on what would have been her 25th birthday.

The whole family came this time, and we finally told everyone the truth about the curse and what really happened.

My aunts and uncles cried when they heard how my sister died and why we kept it secret.

We planted a tree in the park with a plaque that had her name and the date.

Seth got arrested two weeks after the trial for trying to intimidate another witness. They put him in the same jail as his boss while he waited for his own trial.

A few days later, he was found dead in his cell. Officials ruled it a suicide.

Luna said someone probably killed him to keep him quiet about the network, but the cops called it suicide anyway.

Another person from the network got picked up in Texas trying to threaten one of the other families.

Our support group kept meeting every week, and more people kept joining as word spread.

Mom moved in with Jerome after six months and sold the house that had so many bad memories.

I helped her pack up my sister’s room, and we donated her clothes to charity. We kept her jewelry and photos, but let go of everything else that hurt too much to see.

My job let me work from home three days a week so I didn’t have to worry about my commute as much.

I still checked mirrors and looked over my shoulder, but the fear wasn’t as sharp anymore.

Mom and Jerome got engaged on the one-year anniversary of the trial ending.

Life wasn’t normal and never would be, but we were building something better from what was left.

Mom and I talked every day and went to therapy together once a month.

We started a scholarship in my sister’s name for nursing students, since that’s what she wanted to be.

The organization helped 50 families get restraining orders and connected them with security companies.

Three more people from his network got arrested when they tried to collect on old jobs.

I dated someone for a few months, but couldn’t handle the anxiety of bringing someone new into this mess.

Mom understood and said there was no rush to move forward faster than I was ready.

We visited my sister’s grave every month and told her about our lives and how we were doing.

The fear would always be there, but we learned to live around it instead of letting it control everything.

Mom smiled more now, and even laughed at Jerome’s bad jokes sometimes.

We were closer than we’d ever been before—connected by survival and the promise to keep living for my sister.

And that’s the whole thing. Nothing over the top—just the story as it happened.

Thanks for hanging out with me. It always feels like catching up with a buddy.

We’ll do it again soon.