Published in Human Parts
November 3, 2020
Blood Is Thicker Than Your Obsession: A Letter to My Brother’s Kidnapper
You thought you knew him. You were wrong.
By Victoria Reed
I read your book, Crystal.
I read all 347 pages of your self-aggrandizing manifesto about how my brother “never saw you” and how you “made him remember.” I read your kicked-puppy account of those five days in the silo, your faux intellectual observations about power and recognition, your desperate need for him to finally, finally see who you really were.
Here’s what you never understood: I’ve seen Jackson Reed every day of his life for thirty-four years. I’ve seen him at his absolute worst and his questionable best. And you? You got five days with a man who never thought of you at all.
Let me tell you what you missed.
August 1, 2017 - Mercy General Hospital, Memphis
I stood outside his hospital room for twenty minutes before going in. Not because I was scared of his reaction at the sight of me—though I should have been—but because I needed to figure out how to say what I’d come to say.
Through the small window in the heavy door, I could see him. Bruises mottled his face in sick yellows and purples. His wrists were wrapped in white gauze where the restraints had cut into skin. An IV dripped steadily into his arm, replacing fluids his body had been denied.
He looked small. My big brother who’d always seemed invincible, reduced to a broken body in a hospital bed.
When I finally walked in, he opened one swollen eye.
“Vic,” he said, voice raw. “You came.”
“Don’t act surprised.,” I said, setting down my purse with shaking hands. “Of course I came.”
“After everything you said—”
“I slept with her.”
The words fell out before I could stop them. I’d planned to build up to it, to explain first, but seeing him there—alive when he almost wasn’t—I couldn’t hold it in.
He stared at me with his one good eye. Then, unbelievably, his cracked lips curved into something like a smile.
“Me too,” he said.
The laugh that bubbled out of me was inappropriate, bordering on hysterical. “Don’t tell Mom, okay?”
That’s when he reached for me with his bandaged hands, pulled my head down, and kissed my forehead like he used to when I was little and had nightmares.
“I won’t but you should. Maybe that’ll be what gets her to stop calling you,” he whispered against my hair.
The Conversation We Should Have Had Years Ago
If he hadn’t been covered in bruises, and in pain, I would have curled up in the tiny bed with him. It pained me that I was confined to the visitor’s chair.
But for the first time in our adult lives, we talked. Really talked without sarcasm and ironic detachment padding our interactions.
“I didn’t just sleep with her because I was attracted to her,” I said. “I did it to stick it you. Because if you were wrong about her, maybe you were wrong about Mom. And if you were right about Mom...”
“Then you’d have to admit she was using you,” Jackson finished. “Yeah. I get it.”
“It’s just seemed a reasonable explanation. My woman-hating brother....”
“Vic—”
“You tried to tell me. You tried, and I compared you to her. At a fucking crime scene. On Instagram Live.” My voice broke. “Forty-seven thousand people heard me say you were just like Mom.”
“You weren’t entirely wrong,” he said quietly. “Mom always got to maintain the upper hand by using people. Discard when no longer useful. I was doing that too. Just in a less overt way. Different kind of using, but still.”
“That doesn’t make it okay—”
“No,” he agreed. “It doesn’t. But people don’t always act okay.”
We sat in silence for a moment. The heart monitor beeped steadily. Outside, I could hear the normal sounds of a hospital—footsteps, distant conversations, life going on.
Someone, way in the distance, laughed–a sound that felt completely foreign at that moment.
“She told me things,” I said finally. “Crystal. When we were... together. She asked about you. About your investigation. I told her everything. Where you were, who you were with, what you’d found.”
Jackson’s face went carefully neutral.
“I might as well have drawn her a map,” I continued. “I wanted her to like me so bad!”
“She’s good at manipulation,” Jackson said. “She’d been doing it since she was seventeen.”
“Stop,” I said. “Stop trying to make me feel better. I almost got you killed because I was so desperate for approval that I ignored every red flag you tried to show me.”
“And I almost got myself killed because I was too arrogant to think a woman could be dangerous,” he countered. “We both fucked up.”
What You Never Knew, Crystal
In your book, you seethed about Jackson’s inability to remember you from Lejeune. How it ate at you. How you resented him for desiring Irina, but not “Memphis.”
You want to know what he talked about during those twenty minutes before I got the courage to walk into his room? When the nurse was taking his vitals and making small talk?
He talked about me.
Told her about how I used to follow him around everywhere when we were kids. How I’d sneak into his room during thunderstorms. How he taught me to throw a punch when Brad Williams kept pulling my hair in third grade.
“My sister’s coming,” he told the nurse. “We had a fight, but she’s coming.”
That’s who Jackson Reed is, Crystal. Not the misogynist you tortured. Not the fake feminist you exposed. Not the Marine who failed to notice you. He’s the brother who knew I’d come even when he had every reason to think I wouldn’t.
To Crystal, Who Will Read This From Prison
I need to be clear about something: walking into that hospital room didn’t magically fix us. Trauma doesn’t work that way, despite all the mealy-mouthed platitudes you put in your self-help book–the one my brother wrote for you.
We didn’t hug and cry and forgive each other in some cathartic moment. Instead, we sat with the weight of our mistakes. I owned that I’d endangered his life out of spite. He owned that he’d abandoned me to our mother’s manipulation. We both owned that we’d turned our trauma into weapons against each other.
He held out his hand—the one without the IV. I took it.
And that’s how we sat until he drifted off.
You thought those five days taught you everything about Jackson Reed. You thought your shared military service, your one night together, your violent intimacy gave you some special claim to understanding him.
But here’s what you missed while you were cataloging his failures and demanding his recognition: Jackson Reed is my brother. Not by choice, but by blood and Baptist hymnals and shared trauma and inside jokes you’ll never understand.
You wrote that he finally “saw” you in that silo. And that every time he looked in the mirror, he would think of you.
Sweetheart, you were a five-day nightmare in a lifetime of connection you can’t even fathom.
I’ve seen Jackson through our father’s death, our mother’s cruelty, his failed writing dreams, my Instagram disasters. I’m sure you saw it, but your cult members are calling me a “gay baiter” in the comments under all my posts.
I’ve hated him and loved him and everything in between. I’ll know him until one of us dies—properly, of natural causes, surrounded by family who’ve earned the right to be there.
You? You’re already fading. A cautionary tale he tells the men who flock to his newsletter and community and pay for the privilege of hearing it.
But I’ll still be here. Calling every Tuesday. Visiting for holidays. Slowly, carefully rebuilding what family means when you’ve been raised by wolves.
That’s what blood does, Crystal. It endures longer than obsession. It forgives what strangers never could. It shows up at hospital beds and tries again.
You wanted to be seen? Consider yourself witnessed. And dismissed.
Because at the end of the day, you were just another person who tried to break us. And like our mother, like everyone else who’s tried to weaponize our trauma against us—you failed.
Jackson and I are still here. Still talking. Still family.
And you? You’re just someone who hurt my brother.
Get in line.
Victoria Reed is a lifestyle influencer and advocate for family trauma survivors. She lives in Oklahoma City, where she calls her brother every Tuesday without fail.