One Year Clean (Patreon)

The outfit is such an eyesore to me, but you have to pick your battles. We do see the progress. This is miles from where we were a year ago, just after the rescue. He was almost repulsed by anything that wasn't dirty or threadbare. In comparison this looks like a fashionable teenage revolt.

There is so much we don't know, or ever will know. Who they were, why they did it, where they did it. The easy answer is a bunch of skater kids kidnapped him, moved him between junkie pens and abandoned sites for two months while they worked on him. That's what the police had in the file when they closed it. I have no idea what they did to him.  He's always avoiding my questions and he has client privilege with all the psychiatrists and therapists and whoever else we are paying to rehabilitate him. Not that I want to break that trust. As long as he recovers I don't care how.

But I have a hard time believing that just a bunch of stoner skater punks could mess him up that bad in such a short time. You don't get this rich without stepping on some toes, but I have no idea who would be cross enough to come after my famuily with such an elaborate scheme. He was like feral when the police found him, screaming "fucking fascist pigs" over and over the first 48 hours. If it wasn't for the fact it was done to him, I think everyone would have given up a long time ago, once he was off the worst of his drug addiction. A swearing, lying, thieving rascal with an attitude isn't a clinical condition in most professionals' eyes.

He is still all those things, but to a much lesser extent. I mean, he intellectually knows he doesn't have to steal. The credit card we gave him covers more than most people have in salary, but still he is like a flypaper through any convenience store, pocketing beers and snickers bars. Maybe another year.