Sitting in the back of that cold, damp police car, the officers didn't start the engine. They were confused and visibly unsettled by my terrifying accuracy regarding the farm and the old couple's habits. To clear the confusion, the driver radioed the main station, requesting a deep background check into the civil registries and birth records for Arthur and Maeve Miller.
The wait felt like an eternity. When the dispatcher finally replied, the robotic voice echoing through the tight space of the car delivered a fatal blow to my reality. According to the official state records, my father had never existed. The dispatcher confirmed that there was no son named Thomas listed under my grandparents' names. Their only registered child was Sean.
I remember freezing completely. I begged the officers to check again, to call the local hospitals, to check the parish records. But the police were already staring at me through the rearview mirror with a mixture of profound pity and deep unease.
However, the police are bound by procedure, and they still had one lead left. Despite the impossibility of my father's non-existence, I had also given them the exact details of my mother's family—the O'Connors in Dublin. The officers decided that perhaps my trauma had caused me to confuse my paternal lineage, and that my maternal grandparents might hold the key to my identity.
The drive from Galway to the suburbs of Dublin was the longest, most agonizing journey of my life. The Irish sky outside the window shifted from a drizzling grey to a suffocating, bruised purple as evening approached. I sat silently in the back seat, my mind violently rejecting the reality of the police radio. I convinced myself that my father's records must have been lost in a fire, or a computer glitch. I clung to the desperate belief that the moment we reached Dublin, my mother's parents would see me, recognize me, and explain the massive misunderstanding. Mr. Vidot and Ms. Amelia rode with us in silence, their expressions grim and unreadable, offering no false comfort.
Hours later, the cruiser pulled into a quiet, neatly paved suburban street in Dublin. I recognized the house immediately—the white picket fence, the specific rose bushes my grandmother spent hours tending to, the familiar blue front door.
But the lingering dread in my stomach had grown so heavy that I didn't run to the door this time. I walked slowly behind the police officers, my legs feeling like they were made of lead.
When my maternal grandparents answered the door, the exact same tragedy played out, only this time, it felt infinitely more cruel because I already knew the script.
The officers asked if they recognized me. They looked at me with blank, polite curiosity and shook their heads.
I didn't shout this time. My voice was small, entirely broken, as I asked them to call my Aunt Siobhan, reminding them of the oversized knitted sweaters she sent me every Christmas. I told them about the specific way my mother used to arrange the living room furniture during the holidays.
My maternal grandmother looked at me with a heartbreaking gentleness, the kind of absolute pity that strips away all hope. She softly told the officers that they didn't have a daughter named Sarah. She explained that Siobhan was their only child, and that she had never been an aunt.
The police officers looked exhausted and deeply disturbed. They didn't even need to ask me to return to the car; I walked back to the cruiser on my own, moving like a ghost.
I sat in the back seat and waited for the final nail in the coffin.
The officer radioed dispatch one last time, asking them to run a full background check on the O'Connor family, specifically looking for any record of a Sarah O'Connor. The radio crackled with static for several minutes. When the response finally came, it was exactly what I had dreaded.
The state records confirmed that Siobhan was an only child. The daughter I claimed to be born from, the woman who had sung me to sleep and scolded me for my torn clothes, did not exist in any system, on any piece of paper, anywhere in the world.
My parents… on paper… had never been born.
I remember looking out the rain-streaked window at my mother's childhood home, desperately wishing for the ground to open up and swallow me. I remembered holding my grandmother's hands just hours earlier, asking her to remember me. I remembered the pity in the eyes of everyone I had spoken to that day. The kind of pity adults reserve for a lost child who clearly believes in a complete delusion.
That moment in the driveway in Dublin broke something structural and irreplaceable inside my mind.
Because by then, sitting in the suffocating silence of the police car, the absolute, inescapable truth of my situation had finally settled into my bones. It wasn't just my house that had mysteriously disappeared. It wasn't just my school records that had been misplaced. It wasn't just my neighbors suffering from a sudden, localized amnesia.
My entire life had been unwritten.
The police continued trying for a while longer. They drove me back to the main precinct in the city. I sat on a hard plastic chair in a brightly lit, sterile hallway while the officers made countless phone calls to different child welfare departments, trying to find some loophole, some missing file, some distant, forgotten relative who might recognize my description. But the bureaucratic system is designed to process verifiable facts, and the undeniable fact was: I did not exist.
Eventually, as the night deepened and the station grew quiet, even the police ran out of options. The officers looked at me with helpless, defeated expressions. Without any records, without a birth certificate, and without any relatives willing or able to claim me, there was only one place left for an undocumented minor in the eyes of the law.
An orphanage.
Or, as they coldly referred to it on their paperwork, a 'State Care Facility'.
At that time, sitting in that freezing police station, that word sounded like a final, inescapable death sentence. It was a place designed for children who had absolutely no one in the world. A place where forgotten lives and broken anomalies were quietly stored away, hidden behind brick walls and iron gates so the rest of society wouldn't have to deal with them. I realized that I would be given a new name. I would be assigned a fabricated history. I would be processed, numbered, and locked away. That was supposed to be my permanent future. I was going to rot away in a crowded, noisy room, slowly losing my mind, constantly mourning a family that the entire world insisted had never been real.
But before the desk sergeant could stamp the final transfer papers and hand me over to the state workers, Mr. Vidot and Ms. Amelia stepped in.
They had been quietly observing the entire agonizing, bureaucratic nightmare unfold from the corner of the precinct. They asked the police for a few minutes alone with me in an empty interview room. Once the heavy metal door clicked shut, sealing us in a quiet, windowless box, they told me that there was another option.
They told me about a place where children like me were staying. A place where people wouldn't look at me with pity or think I was clinically insane. A place where the adults would actually believe the terrifying things I had seen, instead of dismissing them as the trauma-induced imagination of a broken boy.
Mr. Vidot sat across from me at the metal table. He didn't use the soft, patronizing tone adults usually use with victims. He spoke to me like an equal, his voice a low, serious rumble that commanded my scattered attention.
He explained that the world was far wider, and far darker, than normal people realized. There were individuals in the world who possessed unusual, impossible abilities. Things that completely defied logic, physics, and reality itself.
And then, he told me something far more frightening.
He explained that there were people who actively hunted those abilities.
According to them, the man in the heavy black coat—the man whose rhythmic footsteps still echoed in my waking nightmares—was likely one of those hunters.
Mr. Vidot made it very clear that if I went into the state system, if I was placed in a normal orphanage, I would be sitting out in the open. Blind and unprotected. They warned me that there was a very high chance the man in the coat would realize he had missed me. He might track me down again. And the next time he came for me, Ms. Amelia softly added, there might not be anyone strong enough to stop him.
Looking back on it now, after all these years, the choice they offered me in that dim police station room was hardly a choice at all.
On one side was a future filled with sterile walls and strangers who didn't know me, trapped in a world that had already completely forgotten I existed. I would be a nameless ward of the state, waiting helplessly in the dark for a monster in a black coat to finish the job he started.
On the other side were two people who had at least tried to protect me. Two people who didn't look at me like I was a broken toy. Two people who firmly believed that my nightmare, the erasure of my entire universe, was completely real.
For a thirteen-year-old boy who had just had his entire existence wiped clean, the answer was remarkably simple.
I chose to go with them.
We walked out of the police station that night, leaving the confused officers and the blank paperwork behind. They took me out into the cold Irish night and brought me to the place they had mentioned.
A place that simply called itself an academy.
Liam paused for a long, heavy moment after saying that.
Then he looked up at Jack, his posture loosening just a fraction, and gave a faint, incredibly tired smile.
"So," he said quietly, his voice barely above a whisper, "that's how I ended up here."