Page 32 of Forever We Embrace: The Later Years
“Will you call them?”
“No.” I keep my hands visible on the table. “We won’t contact anyone outside Ember House unless you ask us to or there’s an immediate medical emergency. We can explain every exception before you decide what you want recorded.”
Philomena looks at the door.
Blossom notices and steps farther from it. “You can leave that open, close it, or ask one of us to sit outside.”
“Open,” Philomena whispers.
“It stays open,” Blossom says.
The advocate leaves once Philomena asks her to. Blossom brings water, a bowl of soup, and a folded blanket, then waits until Philomena decides she’d rather have the food left beside her than placed directly in front of her.
For the first twenty minutes, she answers only what we need to arrange a room. She doesn’t give us an address, the names of the people who transported her, or the date she escaped. I don’t ask for any of it.
When I explain that no outside organization will be contacted, her fingers stop moving over the canvas strap.
“They said I owed them for leaving.”
I close the intake form instead of writing. “Who said that?”
Philomena glances toward Blossom, then back at me. “The placement service. They said the family paid for my evaluation, the housing, and the matching. I left before the transfer was finished, so the debt became mine.”
“What did they call the service?”
She shakes her head. “Different names. The building had one name. The papers had another. Sometimes the staff used a foundation name, but it changed.”
That fits the structures Maceo has been tracing, but I don’t tell her that.
“Do you want to tell me more about how it worked?” I ask. “You don’t have to.”
Philomena presses her lips together before nodding.
The service presented itself as a charitable placement program for Omegas without stable packs. Families made donations that supposedly covered evaluations, temporary housing, and transfer costs. The program matched residents according to compatibility, trauma response, and what staff called private-sponsor interest.
Every transfer was described as a placement, even when money changed hands.
Before anyone left, they signed nondisclosure agreements stating that disclosure could make them responsible for the sponsor’s expenses. Philomena remembers being told that speaking publicly could ruin a donor’s tax status and leave her liable for the full cost of her care.
The language turns the room cold around me because I’ve heard it before. I ask what the organization called each stage and let her answer in her own language.
Tiered intake.
Compatibility review.
Sponsor interest.
Placement debt.
By the third phrase, I no longer need to wonder whether someone copied Hearthstone’s charitable appearance. They’re using its internal method.
Philomena rubs one thumb over the frayed edge of her bag. “They said I was easier to match because I froze instead of fighting. They wrote it like it was something good.”
My body remembers before I can stop it: a room with no windows, a man discussing my response to restraint as if Iweren’t sitting three feet away, the careful language that made fear sound like compliance and purchase sound like care.
I keep my voice steady. “What they wrote about you doesn’t belong to them,” I say. “You don’t have to use their words here.”
Her eyes fill, but she doesn’t look away.
