Casey would, and by then, I was so frantic with a need for answers, real answers, that I didn’t care who I met that day.
I was seventeen and I got as far as the door.
Casey stopped me from getting through it.
I can still feel it, the way the world fell around me, turned me suddenly thirteen again. It was like I had a sense of the ending before it happened. I sobbed, screamed for my sister. I remember Casey’s grip on my arm as she pulled me away. I don’t remember what she told me, but I remember that hard, final look in her eyes and all my want left me. I went home and woke up the next morning in the absence of the one last part of me that was holding so tightly to my past.
It was like I had died.
“I’ll do anything to protect this work,” she says, “and Lev’s vision. You felt like a threat to both, because you couldn’t accept that Bea—”
“You said she didn’t want me—”
“And I was telling you the truth,” Casey says, and I cross my arms and look away from her. “And now you know that I was telling you the truth.”
“But you never ever told me why.” My voice cracks. “What do you think I’d—how else could I take it? It only ever looked like you were keeping her from me.”
“I didn’t always handle it as well as I could have,” she admits. “You tried my patience like very, very few people have.”
I laugh a little. “Small consolation.”
“I think we would have always ended up here, Lo. Lev often told me to be careful with you because you were—” She stops abruptly, and there’s something in her face that tells me it would be useless to ask her to finish the sentence, but I want more than anything for her to finish that sentence. Because I was what? “But he’d never seen you in person after, didn’t know how willful and reckless and determined you were. I was a little in awe of it…”
“Awe,” I echo.
“Yes,” Casey says. “And I didn’t know how to honor Bea’s wishes and tread as carefully as the situation warranted. I was often reacting to you instead of thinking it through. I could have finessed my approach. Knowing what I knew, I could have—and should have—at least tried…” She shrugs, helplessly. “Regardless, I knew nothing would stop you. Whatever you might think of me, Lo, I never underestimated you.”
It’s the closest thing I might ever get to an apology from Casey Byers. The only thing I can manage to offer in response is to nod. There’s no forgiveness in me, I don’t think. Just a brutal acceptance of all that has been lost and a resigned march forward in the face of no other options. She might have done it differently but what does it matter, if it’s already been done?
“My father’s favorite pastime was underestimating me,” Casey says. “He wanted me empty. I was just a body and then Lev, he comes along, and he sees more than that. He saw my soul.” She looks up at me and her eyes are full of fire. “Do you know what that’s like, Lo? To be really, truly seen?”
My next interview with Lev is at the Garrett Farm, over the weekend.
Between this and SVO, it feels like I never get a day off.
I listen to his famous 2014 sermon—the one that supposedly predicted the 2016 election and its fallout—on the way, the sound of his voice whispering in my ear as the road disappears under the Buick. It’s better in the car today but only a little. The long stretch of highway is desolate, the absence of others keeping my anxiety to a dull roar.
I’ve received revelation.
The recording is muffled, as though made through someone’s coat pocket.
In two years, a darkness will settle over our nation, brought by a man who wears no masks. He is who he claims to be. He will call for a wall built on the promise of greatness, but the foundation is rot. The first brick laid will be fear. The second: ignorance. The third: hate. Your neighbors are no longer your neighbors. Their masks will come off, and they will spread the darkness. They will rally in hate. Innocents will die. Children will suffer.
No matter how many Project-related Reddit rabbit holes I’ve fallen down, I can’t find any offering proof that this recording is fake or tampered with. Lev said