Chapter 8 - THE WOMEN IN VERMONT
The Vermont property operated as a wellness retreat.
No exterior fences.
No visible guards.
Patients could walk in the garden.
They could not leave.
Their phones were stored “for treatment.”
Their families received updates from Holloway doctors.
Each woman had been declared temporarily unstable during pregnancy.
Most came from wealthy families.
Trusts.
Businesses.
Inheritance disputes.
The same pattern.
One woman, Rebecca Hale, was thirty-six weeks pregnant and scheduled for an induced delivery.
Her family believed she was receiving anxiety care.
In reality, court documents already transferred newborn custody to a Holloway-affiliated adoption agency.
Agent Sloan led the raid.
Katherine and I watched from a secure office.
Rebecca was found in a room painted pale yellow.
A folded blanket lay on her bed.
Not the same one.
The same symbol.
Yellow blankets marked patients whose children would be removed.
The code had been used for decades.
Ashley had remembered it subconsciously from childhood visits to her father’s office.
She unknowingly chose the enemy’s symbol as our rescue code.
That frightened me.
It also changed the meaning.
They used yellow to label women for erasure.
I used it to call help.
The same words could serve power or resistance.
The Vermont records were cleaner than the burned clinic archive.
Digital copies.
Signed orders.
Payment trails.
Video.
Judge Sloan appeared on multiple calls approving transfers.
Claire Holloway discussed donor selection.
Jonathan Carter inspected security.
Michael visited once.
Sarah trained staff to provoke “documentable instability.”
The network could no longer deny structure.
Federal agents arrested Judge Sloan inside his courthouse chambers.
Claire Holloway disappeared before the warrant reached headquarters.
Jonathan remained missing.
Michael agreed to speak after learning Sarah might face life imprisonment.
He asked to see me.
I refused.
He sent a message through Maya.
Jonathan chose the donor. I never agreed.
I read it twice.
Even now, he wanted to separate knowledge from responsibility.
He drugged me.
Controlled appointments.
Signed forms.
Participated in confinement.
Whether he chose Jonathan’s genetic material changed nothing.
I sent one reply.
Tell the prosecutor.
Sarah woke in the hospital under guard.
She refused cooperation.
Katherine asked to confront her.
Agent Sloan allowed a monitored interview.
I watched through video.
Sarah lay pale beneath blankets.
My mother sat across from her.
“You kept me for twenty-two years.”
“You were sick.”
“You knew I wasn’t.”
“You were dangerous.”
“To whom?”
Sarah smiled faintly.
“To the structure.”
That single word exposed everything.
The structure mattered more than any person.
Sarah said Richard Sloan began the program.
Claire expanded it.
Jonathan enforced it.
Judge Sloan legalized it.
Doctors supplied diagnoses.
Families supplied excuses.
She supplied patience.
“What did Michael supply?” Katherine asked.
Sarah’s eyes moved toward the camera.
“Access to Emily.”
My husband had been selected because I would trust love more than paperwork.
Sarah admitted she encouraged every stage of our relationship.
She taught Michael which childhood wounds to mirror.
He told me his mother died young.
False.
He said he hated controlling families.
False.
He said he wanted a quiet life.
False.
Every intimate confession had been rehearsed.
Katherine leaned forward.
“Where is Jonathan?”
Sarah closed her eyes.
“Preparing the fallback.”
“What fallback?”
“If Holloway loses the trusts, they release the patients.”
“That sounds like a good thing.”
“Not alive.”
My mother went still.
The network held former patients under false identities across multiple facilities.
Jonathan had created a destruction protocol.
If federal seizure reached Holloway Systems, automated medication orders would trigger fatal overdoses disguised as medical decline.
Agent Sloan alerted every known facility.
But the microfilm listed only some.
We needed the master database.
Claire Holloway had it.
Daniel Price traced a signal from her company laptop to a private airport.
Police arrived after her plane departed.
Destination unknown.
Then Ashley remembered her father’s old lake house in Canada.
Richard held secret meetings there.
Claire visited every summer.
Canadian authorities searched the property.
Empty.
But inside a safe, they found photographs of my mother across twenty years.
And one recent photograph of me asleep in my bedroom.
Taken from above.
The hidden camera was still active.
Daniel searched our house again.
He found a transmitter inside the smoke detector.
The live feed uploaded to a server in Baltimore.
Federal agents raided the address.
The server room was empty.
A countdown glowed across the monitors.
Six hours until the fallback medication protocol activated.
Below it was a message.
Emily signs the trust transfer, or every remaining patient receives her final dose.
The transfer would place my eighteen-million-dollar trust and Holloway voting shares under Claire’s control permanently.
Hundreds of lives against my signature.
Maya looked at me.
“If you sign under coercion, we can challenge it later.”
“Can we stop the medication orders?”
“Maybe.”
Maybe had become the most dangerous word in my life.
Katherine took my hand.
“They’ll never stop asking if you pay them.”
“What do I do?”
May you like
She looked at the countdown.
“We make them believe you signed.”
