This is not how I envisioned my life when I was a child. It’s not how I thought any part of my life would go. But that’s okay. I’m stronger for everything that has happened. And, without any of that, I wouldn’t be where I am with Michael right now. That, in itself, is worth everything that I’ve been through. I couldn’t imagine if we’d never met. And it scares me to think that, if one event had been different in any of our lives, then I never would have met him. So, while I’ll probably be in therapy for the rest of my life, I’m glad that everything happened the way it did. It brought me to exactly where I needed to be. And that holds true even past meeting Michael. If it hadn’t been for the Company and their relentless hunting of us, we wouldn’t be in the Wingrider community right now — with both of us offered amazing careers, a safe place to live, and people who will go out of their way to make sure that we’re as safe as they are. My parents named me Sara Nicole Tancredi when I was born. I tacked a Doctor onto my name after I graduated from Northwestern University. And, more recently, I took my husband’s last name of Scofield. Now the whole thing is Dr. Sara Nicole Scofield. I know doctors don’t usually take their spouse’s last name when they get married. It ruins the whole paper trail of information, as well as the name recognition that you earned before getting married. But, after everything that we went through to be together, to get married, and be where we’re at now, well, I thought it was worth starting over. Getting a fresh start. Not that we were planning on staying in Chicago, anyway. We were looking for a house elsewhere in the country. My surname wouldn’t have meant anything to anyone outside of Chicago. Except maybe to a few people who recognized it as the former Governor of Illinois’ surname. Yes, my father was Frank Tancredi. He wasn’t always the Governor of the most corrupt state in the country, but that’s who he was when he died. My dad was in politics before I was born. My mom was one of his aids while he was running for his first elected position. Dad never talked much about how they met or what it was like getting to know each other. I know that he loved her dearly, and he would have done anything to change what happened. But those memories were his to keep. I think it hurt too much to talk to me about her. It probably didn’t help that I looked a great deal like her even from the very beginning. I know that they had a long courtship. There was so much going on that they didn’t have time for a whirlwind romance. They dated for a couple years before they got married. And then, six months after the wedding, Dad was elected into the Chicago Mayor’s office. I know that Mom was exceptionally proud of the position Dad had in the community, and that they were both determined to bring the corruption in the state to an end. Their mission to make Illinois a safe place to live didn’t stop just because Mom got pregnant with me. In fact, I think it was the pregnancy that encouraged Dad to step up his political ambitions to Governor. I was born on May 1, 1986, at the Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago. I’m not going to give you birth stats or anything like that. The only people who care are either gone from this world or already know that information. I was healthy, and my parents were proud. Although my dad was also very scared for me and Mom. He wasn’t very popular among a lot of the city’s residents — mostly those who were involved in gangs and drug dealing. He was making the streets safer by putting the gangs and drug dealers out of business, so there were a lot of people who would have liked to hurt him or his family. There was an armed motorcade that followed us home from the hospital when Mom and me were released. Despite the wealth of friends that my parents had, neither of them had any family to speak of. So my homecoming was very uneventful. Just Mom, Dad, and me — the three of us trying to settle into some kind of routine that worked for all of us. Of course my routine was the most important, but I guess it all worked out after some initial trials and tribulations. Again, I’m not going to give you many details, but my early childhood was fairly uneventful. I was a very average baby and toddler. The only thing I excelled at was ruining my clothes with mud and grass. I loved being outside no matter what the weather was. I made mud pies for Dad to eat when he got home from work. I picked flowers out of my mom’s garden to give her as presents because I loved her. Unless there was lightning striking nearby, I was outside and playing in the yard. I loved it when it rained and I could splash through puddles. I loved the feel of wet grass and mud between my toes. In the winter (because back then we actually had real winters), I would make snow forts in the back yard with slides and places to hide. I was a very imaginative child, even if I didn’t have many friends to share my creativity with. There were a couple kids in the neighborhood that my parents felt comfortable letting me play with, but most of the time I was by myself. I kinda preferred it that way. Then I didn’t have to worry about someone else ruining the thing I was so proudly building. I didn’t actually start to get social until I started kindergarten. And that was trauma on a level that, at that age, was beyond what I could handle. Starting school was — for more than one reason — one of the worst parts of my life. I didn’t have much interaction with other children before I started. Being thrown into a classroom of 30 other kids was more than a little overwhelming. I sat on the floor in a corner of the classroom for the first week or two, just watching and processing this new environment that I’d been thrown into. It took a while to learn that the other kids weren’t going to hurt me. That I could have fun and learn new things. Mom had always read to me a lot. At least three books a day, sometimes more along the lines of four or five. I was able to read in kindergarten. I was also pretty good at writing my name. Thankfully it wasn’t too horribly long. There was one child in my class who’s name was Christina-Marie Fairbanks. I felt so bad for her once I realized how long her name was, and how long it took her to write it out on every piece of school work that we did. One day I actually thanked my parents for giving me a short, easy name. My parents thought it was hysterical, but I was serious. My mom was taken from us during my first year in school. Two weeks before Christmas she was shot down outside a supermarket. I was at school when it happened. I remember Dad coming into the classroom to get me. I was occupied with a drawing that I was going to give to Mom. He came over, scooped me up out of my desk, and started for the door with me. I was too busy screaming for my drawing to realize that he was crying. I remember that he turned around, went back so I could get my drawing, and then he carried me out of the building and to a waiting car. That’s when I started getting confused. I realized as he was buckling me into my car seat that he was crying. When I asked what was wrong, he looked me straight in the eyes, took my hands, and whispered, “Sara, Mommy was just killed.” I didn’t know what that meant. I had never experienced death before. We got home and I ran into the house looking for my mom. Dad sat me down in the living room and tried to explain that Mommy was never coming back. It didn’t sink in what “dead” and “never coming back” meant. I told Dad that I’d wait to give her the drawing I made in school. Three days later we went to the funeral, and I brought my drawing with me. Seeing my mom in a casket was probably the most traumatizing event in my life. It definitely was up to that point, but it might still be the worst memory I have. Dad helped me put my drawing in the casket, and then I cried the rest of the day until I was so worn out that I fell asleep in the car on the way home. My dad threw himself into his work after my mom’s funeral. He was determined that he wouldn’t lose me the same way he’d lost her. I rarely saw my dad from that point on. I was left with a nanny when I was home. She cooked my meals, read to me, and helped me with my homework. Homework that I wasn’t inclined to do. I slipped into deep depression after my mom’s funeral. I couldn’t find a smile even for the things that I enjoyed. My teacher got worried when, after a couple of weeks, I still refused to interact with other children. All the progress I’d made was completely gone. She called my dad and told him about her concerns. My dad’s response was to come home and yell at me. I yelled back, but I don’t recall what I said to him. Whatever it was, he took me over his knee and spanked me for the first time in my life. Then he sent me off to bed without any dinner. My relationship with my dad was severely damaged by that incident. I didn’t trust him after that, and I didn’t want to be around him. I found excuses to keep my distance when he was home. He didn’t seem to mind. It took me a couple years to find happiness again. Things didn’t get good again until third grade. That’s when I started to take a real interest in math and science — things that everyone said girls weren’t good at. Math and science made sense to me. It never changed. There weren’t wonky rules governing it. It wasn’t like English where there are always exceptions to every rule, and sometimes there are no rules. Math and science follow a formula that’s always the same. I joined math and science clubs in school, where I actually made my first real friends. One of my new friends was a boy named Brian. He was a math geek. He was also two years older than me. But we challenged each other. I may have only been eight years old, but I was doing math problems that high school students were having problems with. Brian was, too. Every weekend we would come up with the hardest problem we could think of for the other to solve. Then, on Mondays, we’d exchange problems and have the week to solve it. It had to be done on Friday before the end of the school day, and if one of us couldn’t find the solution, then we had to pay the other $1. It was a good incentive to find the solution to the problems Brian gave me. Over the course of the year I paid out $10, but in that same year, I earned $35. The money was put in a savings account to pay for my college education. My other friend in school was a girl named Kelly. She was a science nerd. I never had any competitions with her, but we did work together on several projects. I had already taken an interest in medicine when I met Kelly. She was also interested in becoming a doctor when she grew up. We decided to invent a cure for cancer for our first science project. We had the whole school year to complete our projects, so we spent most days in the Chicago Public Library. My nanny would take us, and then help us decipher the research papers we were reading. Looking back on it now, I feel bad for my nanny. She had to have been lost in what she was reading, but thankfully Kel and I were able to understand the processes and come up with our own methods for curing cancer. We didn’t have to prove our concept (thank God), but we did have to show how it would work and why it would work. Our method involved turning on and off certain genes to control the cancer. It was definitely an ambitious project, and we won our science fair, but we set the bar really high for the rest of our educations. Every year we had to come up with better and better projects. We had refined our process for curing cancer and made it a testable hypothesis by the time we graduated high school. I believe Kelly even got a grant and lab time to test our hypotheses. I turned down the offer because I had been accepted into Northwestern and I was going on to earn my Ph.D. I was 16 when I graduated from high school and headed off to college. I should probably mention that my dad and I had huge arguments when he discovered that I was headed towards a medical degree. He wanted me to get into politics and carry on what he was doing. He didn’t want me to become a doctor. He said I was going to work my ass off for a program that I probably wouldn’t finish. I was going to be so far in debt that I’d never get out of it. I argued that I was passionate about medicine, that I wanted to help heal people, and that my high school education had prepared me to do well in med school. He did everything short of forbidding me to go into med school. By that time he was the Governor of Illinois, and he was still working on cleaning up the state’s bad reputation. He was still struggling to clean up Chicago. I was glad to get away. I started school and thanked God for being far enough away from my dad that he couldn’t just show up at my dorm room. I threw myself into my education while still having some fun once in a while. All of my general education classes flew by. I passed everything with A’s and had a 4.0 GPA by the time I started my core classes. Some of my professors had seen my science projects from high school, and they expected great things from me. They pushed me hard to make sure that I was reaching my full potential. Every push made me try that much harder. I wasn’t able to maintain my 4.0 once I got into my core classes, but I never dropped below a 3.98. I carried that GPA through my program. I wasn’t the best in my class, but I was close. I was in my first year of my residency when my life got turned upside down for the second time. I was on my way to the hospital to start my shift when a drunk driver ran a red light and T-boned my car on the driver’s side. My airbags went off and shrapnel flew out of them at me. I was hit in the side and shoulder with metal shards. I don’t remember anything from about an hour before the accident until about a week later. When I woke up, I was in absolute agony. Nerves had been severed in my shoulder and had to be grafted back together. The pain was unbearable, so they put me on morphine to manage the pain. That was the beginning of something that got out of control. I went through my rehab and everything, got back into my residency, but I kept taking the morphine. I was addicted well before my shoulder was healed. And, working at a hospital, I was able to easily get access to vials of morphine and syringes whenever I needed them. The rest of my residency was spent high on morphine. Thankfully I never did anything that would have risked a life, and I somehow managed to pass my final exams and become a licensed doctor. It wasn’t until after I finished my residency that one of my co-workers realized I was an addict. He gave me an ultimatum — either I took a voluntary leave of absence and went into rehab, or he was going to let the board know that I was practicing while high. I did the smart thing and got into rehab. Rehab was excruciating. Not only was I dealing with the withdrawals from the morphine, but I was also dealing with the pain in my shoulder. It was healed, but nerve pain never really goes away fully. Six months of rehab got me clean and thinking clearly for the first time in a long time. That’s when I decided to leave the hospital and take an opening at Fox River State Penitentiary. The convicts were quite often addicts who were in prison on drug charges. I could understand them and help them. I would have been in the same place if things had gone just slightly different in my life. The first thing you’re told when you start working in a prison is to NEVER fall in love with an inmate. They are cons. They know how to use people to get what they want. If you fall in love with an inmate, you’re likely to do something that will end you up in prison, too. I knew that going in. I was prepared for the guys to try getting my attention and trying to woo me. What I never expected was Michael Scofield. Nothing could have prepared me for him. Right from the beginning, I knew that Michael wasn’t like the other cons in the prison. There was something about him that screamed that he didn’t belong there. He was coming in every day for insulin shots, and within about a week I found myself looking forward to when he would come in. I knew what was happening, so I decided to look into him and see what he was arrested for. I did a general background check on him, and discovered that he was a successful engineer on the outside before he decided to rob a bank with a gun. He shot the ceiling, so the judge gave him three years in Fox River. I didn’t understand why he’d tried to rob a bank when he had a successful career. The pieces just didn’t fit. Not until the night of the escape. He asked me to leave the infirmary door unlocked. To just forget to lock it so they could use the room to escape. I knew that I shouldn’t. I knew that I was going to lose my job and probably end up in prison, but I left the door unlocked. Then I left the prison for the night, scored a hit on my way home, and tried to OD in my apartment. I wasn’t going to jail. And I’d never see Michael again. What reason was there for living? My dad heard about the escape as soon as it happened. He was told they used the infirmary to get out. So he called my phone to find out what had happened. He got concerned when I didn’t answer, so he came over to my apartment and found me OD’d on my couch. He called an ambulance and got me to the hospital where they were able to save my life. Then I found myself back in rehab. During my much shorter stint in rehab, my dad tried to convince me to lie about what had happened when the feds came to ask questions. I adamantly refused to lie. And then started my life on the run. Michael contacted me once I was out of rehab. He promised that we wouldn’t always be on the run. That there was something better than that for us when it was all said and done. I believed him. I loved him. I wanted to be with him as much as he wanted to be with me. Over the course of the next two years life was hell. We discovered shortly after the escape that there was a force behind the scenes that was determined on killing Michael and his brother, Lincoln. The force had a name — The Company. The tendrils of The Company ran deep, from local law enforcement agencies around the country to every level of government. Once my dad found out that I was on the run with Michael and Lincoln, he looked into Linc’s conviction and found it suspicious. Something that I’d tried to get him to see for months before he looked into it on his own. The Company got nervous when my dad started poking the hornet’s nest, and they staged his death to look like a suicide. I knew my dad would never commit suicide. He was too passionate about fixing the world. He was going to be Vice President. I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to him. And then I was captured and tortured by The Company. I managed to escape and get back to Michael, but that was just the beginning. In the end, I was tortured twice before I managed to escape with my life. I was in Panama the second time. That’s where we’d ended up after the prison break. I wasn’t able to get back to Michael when I escaped in Panama. He was in prison, working on an escape, when I escaped. I fled back to Chicago and the only person I knew who could help me. One of my dad’s longtime friends. He gave me a safe place to stay, and life was quiet, if not tense, until Michael arrived. He had broken out of the Panamanian prison and returned to Chicago in search of me. I’m not gonna detail everything else that happened. It’s too convoluted and twisted to go into. But, basically, Michael was put in charge of taking down The Company. The good guys in the government couldn’t do it themselves, so they asked an ex-con to do it for them. And they compelled Michael’s cooperation by threatening him with 15 years of prison time if he didn’t help. I think Michael would have done the time if The Company hadn’t taken aim at my head just minutes after we’d finished making love for the first time. That’s when he realized that I was in danger, and he couldn’t allow that. Over the next several months we did everything we could to cripple and take down The Company. Then Michael started getting nose bleeds. Eventually I convinced him to go to a hospital, and we found out that he had a brain tumor. The doctors weren’t sure if they could remove it. Eventually, The Company stepped in and offered an experimental surgery if we agreed to help them with something. We took the offer. We didn’t have any other choice. And that’s where our lives got turned completely upside down for the next 11 years. After the surgery, Michael was taken to a private residence to recover. I went in search of him, and Company operatives captured me. I don’t remember anything for the next two years. I have absolutely no memories at all. All I know for sure is that they did their very best to wipe our memories and turn us into Company operatives. It worked for a while. I became Seri McAllister, and Michael became Jonah Callahan. We never worked together. They kept us as far apart as possible. They gave us completely new backgrounds. In their background for me, I was raised in a bad part of Los Angeles. An only child with parents struggling to keep a roof over our heads. I saw my way out through getting good grades and making it into med school. Somehow, I avoided getting tangled into the gang life and made it out of high school in one piece. I went on to Northwestern in Chicago and got my medical license. Then, immediately after I got my license, I was recruited into the military. They needed good doctors. For six years I was a military doctor. Helping soldiers on the battlefield and saving lives in emergencies. I was recruited into the CIA from the military. Once again, I was used as an emergency doctor. They sent me around the world when missions went wrong, saving the lives of operatives right there in the field. I might have done that for the rest of my life if someone hadn’t screwed up. Someone put Michael and me in the same bed & breakfast and we ran into each other. Within minutes of meeting, we were running off to another town to be together, and it was while we were at a hotel that our memories started coming back. I recognized him as Michael, and he recognized me as Sara. Over the next three days we worked on escaping the CIA’s grasp. We fled the bed & breakfast we were staying at and fled to Canada. We expected that they’d be looking for us south of the border. All of Michael’s tendencies said that he’d flee south if anything went wrong. But, instead, we fled north into Canada. We’d only been in Canada for one day when the CIA found us. We’d just finished making love when they burst into the cabin we were staying in. Somehow, I made the two agents who burst in explode into a million pieces, covering Michael and me in blood and guts. Then, Michael transported us from our Canadian cabin to a place known as the Wingrider community. He landed us in the tiger sanctuary, where we found ourselves naked, in a compromising position, surrounded by tigers. Thankfully, Shadrik found us quickly. He’s the Ancient in charge of the Wingriders. He helped us find a place to stay, and he explained a bit about who we were and where we were. Apparently, in the process of wiping our memories, The Company had awakened our Ancient abilities. Yes, Michael and me are both Ancients. A race who — at one point — protected a large number of life filled planets. And the Wingriders are a race of aliens from the planet Altear. They came here to help save the planet from inevitable doom that humans are causing. So far they haven’t been very effective at their end goal, but they’re still working on it. We were safe in the Wingrider community, and we’d find out a lot more within the next few days of being there. The house we picked out was gorgeous. It was also free. Wingriders don’t use currency the way humans do. They use trade of services to pay for everything. Our first day there, I met a woman by the name of Tanith McAllister. She was my twin in another life. And she very much wanted to be my sister again. She introduced me to Susan Grianne, another sister from that life. It’s been Susan and her mate, Nicodemus, who have been the most help since Michael and me have gotten here. I feel the deepest connection to Susan out of everyone I’ve met. She’s someone that I feel I can trust to guide us and teach us about what we are. Her and Nic aren’t exactly Ancients, but they’re the closest thing the community has outside of Shadrik. And Shadrik isn’t exactly the nurturing or teaching type. We haven’t been here long, and there’s still deep gaps in both Michael’s memory and mine. We’re still recovering our real lives. It’s coming back in snitches and snatches. We’re also recovering from having been apart for 11 years. It’s like we were never separated, but at the same time, we feel those 11 years acutely. As I mentioned, Michael and me got married soon after we got here. It was our way of affirming our relationship and how much we love each other. Of making our bond official. We have a chance to make new lives for ourselves here. Safe lives for ourselves. I’m not taking a moment of it for granted. We finally have time together that’s guaranteed. Instead of the minutes and hours we were stealing before. I’m looking forward to every moment.