Gabriel says we mustn't blame ourselves for what's happened to our children, but I do. The clues were all there, but we didn't put the puzzle together in time. It's not that we didn't see what was happening; it's that we didn't want to admit it was happening at all. I never imagined that my brilliant son would be unable to handle anything that life threw in his path, and yet his recent actions have proven me disastrously wrong. He's abandoned his career and dishonored his family--what other explanation can there be but that he has lost his mind?

The first sign of trouble was Simon's agitated response to the letters we received from River. He insisted there were secret codes hidden in River's writings, clues to some mystery that only he could understand. I saw nothing in the letters, of course, just River's usual wordplay. Simon's distress was obvious, and yet we didn't take it seriously. We even said the words to him--you're paranoid, you're under stress, you're lost without your sister. I wish we had listened to ourselves that day.

Matters escalated from there, with Simon stealing money from the family accounts, sneaking around the blackout zones, and finally getting arrested. Gabriel interpreted it as disobedience, a son lashing out at his father's discipline; in truth, my husband was trying to reason with a young man whose reason had already left him. We should have gotten help for Simon then, our family pride be damned!

At Gabriel's insistence, the Academy finally permitted us to see the campus security tapes showing Simon and River walking out the front entrance. The Alliance representative told us that security forces tracked our children to the frontier worlds, but lost them in the chaos there. In his madness Simon thought he was saving River from mysterious forces that wanted to harm her, only to drag her off to a frontier populated by criminals and Reavers and Independent soldiers still nursing their grudges, the most dangerous place they could have gone. Who there would be willing