I felt like I could sleep much better knowing the security cameras were put in place in the living room. I finally felt safe again in my own home. I was still putting my string of cans on the door and I knew I should stay alert, but I felt safe.

My shift at the diner on Friday felt like it was flying by in a breeze. I had a nice conversation with Gabe and cleaned every table and booth between waiting on the customers. I didn't even have that much energy before all of this Mrs. Lamb crap started to happen.

I'd gotten so much work done during my shift that I almost forgot to take my break. Luckily, I was able to realize the time and grab my purse from my locker before heading to my normal break spot out behind the diner. When I unlocked my phone, I noticed a missed call from my mom and decided to call her back while I enjoyed the fresh air before having to finish my shift. I assumed she had some book club updates that were urgent and she needed to discuss.

"Hi, Mom," I greeted her as I leaned against the building and pulled my coat close to my body to shield me from the rough wind.

"How could you be so careless, Maren?" she spat through the phone, which took me by surprise. She sounded so upset, but I could not think of anything I'd done to make her angry. And I had a lifetime of practice at making my mom angry, but I'd always known why she was mad.

"What?" I responded in pure confusion.

"I know you're an adult and you like to do things you're own way, but this is disgusting," she continued ranting about something that I still felt left in the dark about.

"Mom, I have no idea what you're talking about," I insisted as I tried to rack my brain for anything that I'd said or done recently that may upset her. Since the last time we talked, absolutely nothing has changed in my life except for the stalker situation, but there was no way she could know about that, and I couldn't see why she would be angry at me for that either. Even though this was just a phone call, I felt the urge to hide like a little kid about to get a spanking.

"Don't play dumb with me, Maren, for God's sake," she muttered and then continued. "I already saw the pictures you sent, I'm assuming by accident and that you have some secret boyfriend you haven't told us about?"

"A boyfriend?" I repeated slowly. Of course, I didn't have a boyfriend. I'd only even been with one person recently, and I clearly would not have considered him a boyfriend. "You mean David?"

"Oh my God," she groaned, sounding utterly disgusted. "I feel sick."

"Tell me what's going on," I tried again to get an answer out of her so that I could at least defend myself against what ever accusations she had against me. "What pictures are you talking about?"

"The naked pictures, Maren!" she nearly yelled at me. "What else could I possibly be talking about?"

"What naked pictures?" I felt even more confused every time she opened her mouth. She wasn't making any sense, and the sinking feeling in my stomach just continued to grow larger.

"Stop playing dumb, I'm trying to have a conversation with you," she said, sounding like she was losing the last bit of her patience. After a long pause, she finally added, "Just an hour ago, I received naked pictures from you."

"That's not possible," I denied the accusation immediately, for a couple of reasons. The first reason being that I'd been working for the past four hours and didn't even have my phone with me. The second reason being that I don't have any naked pictures to send to anybody. Not of me, or of anybody else. "I've been at work all day, it must have been from somebody else, maybe a prank or something."

"I'm not an idiot, I know who sends me texts. Not only is it disgusting to take these pornographic images of yourself, but to spread them to other people too. And you're not even careful about it! You want to be a famous singer, how can you be this careless about the image you put out into the world?" she could barely hear anything that I was saying through her own anger, so I just listened.

By this point, it felt obvious that Mrs. Lamb was behind this somehow. Did he really sneak into the back of the diner while I was working to send pictures to my mom? And I'd never taken a single nude photo in my life, or anything that suggestive, so what photos did he even send to her?

The thought of Mrs. Lamb having been in the diner while I was there, so close to me, made me feel sick. Was he still there? I was alone behind the building, standing on the concrete near a plastic crate that held an ashtray for the employees who liked to smoke on their breaks. I suddenly felt very unsafe being so secluded, and immediately went back inside where I was able to find a small corner of the kitchen to finish the phone call with my mom.

"Can we talk about this later?" I asked her, because I was starting to feel dizzy and overwhelmed but I didn't know how to explain the situation to her without actually explaining the situation, so I needed more time to think of some sort of excuse. "I think there was a misunderstanding."

"Can you imagine how humiliated we would be if these photos ever got around town?" she talked right through me again, but the sound was beginning to blur, like her voice was falling through a tunnel. I wrapped my arm around my body as if that made me feel any safer, and stood with my back against the wall. I looked around for anybody in the kitchen or the dining area that looked suspicious, but nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary.

I wondered if he entered the diner as a customer, if I served him his meal, smiled at him and asked how his day was going. I wondered if I accepted his tip.

"I'll call tonight," I promised my mom dismissively, and then ended the call. I knew that hanging up on her would only make her angrier, but I didn't know what else to do. She wasn't listening to me and I didn't know how to explain it away. I didn't even know how to explain it to myself.

The only other times that Mrs. Lamb had done something malicious was because he was mad at me. First for sleeping with David and then going to the cops. What did I do that would make him want to alienate me from my mother? Maybe he was mad that I was ignoring all of his gifts and taking them to the cops. Or maybe this wasn't a punishment at all, and instead was just a tactic to continue isolating me from the people that I loved.

I numbly finished the rest of my shift and on my way home, decided to call Abigail in hopes that she'd know what to do about my mom. I didn't want to tell her about the stalker situation, but I had to figure out another way to get my mom to believe me.

"You're in big trouble," Abigail answered my call in a low voice.

"It's not real," I said quickly. After checking my phone for the messages, they'd been deleted, so I still had no reference for what had been sent. "Did Mom say anything about what the pictures looked like? Or was there a message sent with them?"

"No, I didn't get any details between all of the rants and hysterical mumbling," she said. "And how is it not real? Did you accidentally send some other woman's nudes to Mom? That's somehow even more bizarre. Unless this is your way of coming out to us, which I totally would support, but this has got to be the weirdest way to go about things."

"I didn't send her anything," I insisted.

"Then what's going on?"

I froze. If I told her about Mrs. Lamb, she would insist that I came home immediately and when my other family members found out the truth, they would do the same thing. I already decided that going home would put my family in danger, so I wouldn't be doing that. However, if I didn't agree to come home, they would send somebody here to stay with me. That would also put them in danger.

My family would rather endanger themselves in an attempt to keep me safe, but I wasn't willing to take that risk.

"I don't know," I lied. "I've never taken or sent a nude picture in my life, I think it's just a prank or something. My phone was in my locker while I was at work and you know I don't always get along with my coworkers. I think maybe one of them might have snuck in and saw Mom as her contact and thought it'd be funny."

"I believe you, Maren," she assured me, and it was like a breath of fresh air hearing her say that to me. "But our parents are going to need a lot more convincing than that."

"I don't know what to do," I admitted as I began to feel overwhelmed with the situation again. I either had to tell them the truth and put them in harm's way, or I could let it go for now and let my mom hate me. Just telling her that it was a lie or a prank by some coworker wasn't going to cut it. She wouldn't believe me until I was shoving the police report in her face showing her that I had a stalker who was willing to go to very creative lengths to fuck with me.

My mom loved me, I knew that, but she always expected the worst from me. She expected me to drop out of high school, to quit vocal lessons, and she expected me to fail when I moved to Cincinnati. She thought very little of my capabilities and moral compass, so I knew that it was so plausible to her that I would have taken nudes and been very careless in who I sent them out to.

"I'll try to talk to Mom for you," Abigail promised me. "But I don't know, Maren, I don't think she's going to buy it. You really have no idea who could have done this? Or why?"

"No, I have no clue," I assured her. "Maybe I could ask my boss about security cameras or something? We have some, but I don't know if they even work. Sending nudes really isn't that big of a deal though, so maybe she'll just cool off on her own?"

"Yeah just give her some time to cool off, I'll let you know how things go," she said to me before we said our goodbyes and hung up.

I wondered to myself why Mrs. Lamb would have chosen this method of fuckery when it felt like a very bizarre attempt at alienation. I know that many parents would just laugh off such an embarrassing mistake if their adult child accidentally sent them a provocative photo. How did Mrs. Lamb know that my parents, especially my mother, would freak out so dramatically about something so small? It could have been a lucky shot in the dark, but it felt much more calculated than that. He tailored this attack to me and my neurotic family, and it just made the whole thing that much more sickening.

I didn't have much time to eat dinner before I had to start getting ready for my show that night, which helped keep my mind off of things for a while. It was at a big cafe with a big stage room for performers. The performance was mundane, but I'd played there before and the customers were fairly generous with their tips. I had finally switched my wardrobe to my winter clothes, so I had an entirely new set of outfits to choose from when getting dressed.

I wasn't so sure that Abigail believed me as much as she said she did, because she didn't sound too convinced. I wondered if she was only telling me what I wanted to hear just to keep me calm. I was worried that her conversation with my mom wouldn't be all that convincing either, but it was the only hope I had.

Mrs. Lamb was really banking on the fact that I wouldn't tell my family the truth, which probably meant that he knew I was afraid he'd hurt them. It was a threat being held over my head without him even explicitly saying it.

I was determined to get my parents to believe me though, because I needed to try my hardest to not let Mrs. Lamb tear me away from my family. Without Lina, they were really all I had. I knew that my siblings would not turn their backs on me just because they thought I sent nudes, but this could have been just the first step in their plan. They had to have a next step to try and alienate me from them too. Tell Joshua that I was a Michigan fan? I was much closer to my siblings than I was to my parents, so it'd be more difficult to separate them from me.

This was one of the more tame of his stunts, and I felt like it couldn't be that hard to combat a rumor. Sure, it wouldn't be easy, but I'd much rather my mom be disgusted about my sex life than be ran off the road.

Chalk it up to bad intentions,
Superficial wide eyed glances.
Asking all these dumbass questions,
like what went wrong?

Blinding fear of being lonely,
never finding one and only.
Open your eyes and then you'll see
what went wrong.

I ended my show with a song called What Went Wrong and the crowd seemed pleased with it. I thanked them and promoted my social media before disappearing off of the stage. I wasn't in the mood for any socialization or being in any large group, so after my guitar was packed up, I left the bar. I missed being able to freely engage with the crowd after a show, as interacting with people who enjoyed my music was one of the best parts of my job before all this happened. Now, it seemed like I was always in a terrible head space to be interacting with anybody.

I never knew if the person approaching me was somebody who was actually out to get me, or was a genuine fan who just wanted to compliment my music.

By the time I left the cafe, it was late, dark and cold, outside. I sat in my car for a minute while it warmed up enough so that I could drive home without my fingers freezing to the steering wheel. I still had lingering anxieties about what happened to Lina, and I knew it was a very real possibility that it could happen to me too.

I always found it soothing to drive at night. I felt like I was the only person in the universe because it was so quiet and dark. Everything seemed deserted and the bright lights blinded my vision as I drove along the quiet roads back toward my apartment. That peaceful night time drive was another thing that Mrs. Lamb had taken from me, because now all I felt when I drove home in the dark was dread.

When I turned on to a long country road, the lights disappeared except for my headlights that led me down the long road that was splitting two sides of a corn field.

Everything was going well, there were no other cars in the visible distance, and I was singing along to a Kacey Musgrave album when I noticed my car starting to cough and jerk. My confusion quickly turned to panic when the car started to slow down and then in a few blinding seconds, I was coming to a complete stop in the middle of nowhere.