which would make its way back to Washington and permanently cut off our source, leaving her no safer.
The next option was to just get her out of there, explain that she was far safer on the run without government backing, that the least hazardous thing for her to do was run from everyone at once. But if she had lived in fear before, that lifestyle would have been a nosedive into an abyss of terror. And now that my father wanted her eliminated again, someone somehow would eventually find her; I couldn’t stall things any longer.
My final conclusion—the only remaining option, yet the hardest sell—came by way of a lesson taught to me by my father, by Peter, by Tommy Fingers, repeatedly drilled into my impressionable head as a kid: Confront your aggressors with aggression. But that night as I sat and formulated my plan, the cab of my car filled with smoke and salty air and lonely ideas, I put their advice into play, knowing the only possible way to grant Melody safety was the riskiest: I had to bring her right to my father’s feet, show him how innocent she was, that she could never pose a threat. I understood Pop’s human side like no one else, paid attention in those moments when he was buried in thought and concern, watched him darken as he used violence and revenge as a buckler against betrayal and rejection. My plan was to reach out and play on those emotions, to ask him to imagine seeing me at age five in a room with Melody as she is just learning to walk and speak her first words, ask him to fathom the idea that one day he would ask his little boy to put a bullet into that baby girl. I hoped and prayed he might not be able to betray her. That he might not be able to betray his own son.
Yet again, the fundamentality of Gardner’s life nudged its way into mine: To win big, you’ve got to risk big. And as I longed for a better solution, I knew my plan was her only shot at true freedom. And if it failed, her story would wind up with its original ending anyway.
I sat in my car noshing on an energy bar produced several seasons prior, washing each bite down with water, formulating what I would say when I approached her. I couldn’t exactly walk in and say, “Now listen, don’t yell for the marshal, but my name is Jonathan Bovaro. I’m not going to hurt you.” I couldn’t think of an approach more surely to elicit a scream. The only thing Melody could reasonably expect from me was violence, and I knew gaining her trust would require me to be true to who I was; I’d have to begin with fear, move backward toward apprehension, and hope to somehow land at dependence. I couldn’t allow myself to be distracted from the reason I was there: Remove Melody from false safety and deliver her to permanent freedom and security. I was not there to win her heart or save her soul. She was just a little girl who’d fallen down a well and gotten stuck, and I had come to offer her a hand to finally pull her out.
Yet my greatest weakness that night was my greatest strength: I knew I would have to scare her. Over the span of my thirty-year life, she’d been a distant part of it for twenty, and in all those years she and I had never looked into each other’s eyes and connected, never communicated, never shared a thought or idea between us. When the moment came, unlike at the gas station, there would be no way for her to look through me. And to know that the first time she’d read my eyes and mind would be under the guise of violence broke my heart.
Just past midnight, I slipped on a thin pair of leather gloves and stepped out of the car, carefully made my way to the darkest side of the nearly abandoned motel and walked up to a strip of rooms sheltered by the shadow of the stairwell to the second floor, recalled all those slow summer evenings with Peter and Gino as teenagers, the wagers we would place on who could break into a building the fastest—first our own family’s, then the neighborhood stores; we rarely stole anything, derived more enjoyment from rearranging things (turning all the cans upside