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When I left the Legion in 2001, I thought I had escaped for good.

I was thousands of miles away, watching from the outside as the empire began to crack.

From afar, I could finally see everything Masiel had done, all the lives he had ruined,

and the men who had dared to speak. I read it all, the stories that had once been hidden from us. And even though my time in the

Legion felt like another life, I was starting to realize that distance wasn't going to make me

free. Knowing the truth didn't make the memories disappear. They just followed me everywhere I went.

I was living in New York when I got the box.

It was sometime after I left.

I couldn't go back home to Monterey even though I missed it terribly.

My family was divided by my decision to leave,

and the whole community was too. Some people stopped calling. Others pretended I didn't exist.

So if I wanted to start over, it had to be somewhere new, a place where no one knew who I was or what I had done.

My first apartment was small and a little dark.

The walls never really looked clean, no matter how much I scrabbed them.

The window faced a brick wall, but I was proud of it anyway. It was mine. For the first time, I was completely alone.

No one telling me what to think, what to wear or how to pray. Just me and the steady hum of the

refrigerator. One morning, I woke up to a strange smell. When I opened the door, there was a

box sitting on the floor outside my apartment. My neighbor said it had been there all night.

I picked it up, brought it inside, and opened it on the counter. It was a bundle of brown paper, inside it a dead black bird.

For a moment I couldn't move.

I just stood there staring at it.

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