… Except it’d mostly be a lie. In fact, her name isn’t even actually lindsey. Or, at least it wasn’t until she was eighteen. The real story is significantly more complicated.

Lorraine was born on a stormy night in backseat of a beat up Buick on the side of a dusty road somewhere in Missouri. Her mother was a seventeen year old high school drop out who was so drugged up that she hardly felt a single contraction and hadn’t seen hide nor hair of the man who had knocked her up since he had blown out of town upon finding out that his underage girlfriend was knocked up. Charming, right? But things didn’t actually turn out all that bad… which is probably due in large part to the fact that her mother had dropped her off at a local hospital only hours after her birth, wrapped in a wool blanket.

It wasn’t long before the bouncing baby girl with her blond curls and big blue eyes found a family to take her in while the state of Missouri searched for the parents that had left the baby behind. But as with most children abandoned in Safe Haven locations, she soon fell into the depths of the foster system, lost to mountains of paperwork and more temporary homes than she could count. By the time she was three, she was keenly aware of the fact that she was little more than a paycheck to the newest set of parents.

Except things changed on her fifth birthday, when suddenly, a man came into her life. He said his name was David and that he was her father. He apologized to her for taking so long to find her, hugged her and promised that he wasn’t going to anywhere. So began an all new adventure. Or at least, a chapter in the young girl’s life that was… well, pretty fucking weird.

See, David Wilson wasn’t just a normal dude. It wasn’t like he had been going to his average Joe job every day, sitting in his office while diligently searching high and low for his missing daughter all these years. That would be too normal, that would be too easy, and Lorraine had accepted a long time ago that her life would never be normal or easy. Which was actually sort of a shitty thing for a five year old to accept when you think about it. No, David was a career criminal. A thief and con artist, he had been away on a job when his daughter was born and by the time he’d found out about it, she was already so deep in the system that it had been almost impossible to find her. So naturally, he took his sweet ass time. But a five year old with big blue eyes didn’t see it that way.

Instead, she wanted nothing more than to stay by her father’s side, to be a part of all the adventures he would go on to tell her about. She wanted to learn and be as good as he was, and he wasted no time taking her under his wing… Because some things were just easier when you were an adorable kid. Hell, it didn’t take long for her to go from small cons like fake fundraisers and girl scout cookie schemes, to bigger things, like using her big sad eyes to coax people into doing things for her, distracting them, giving her father a chance to rob them blind. No, she was good.

The pair never stayed in the same place for more than a few months at a time, and every time they moved on from one town, they chose a different name, a different story. The only exception to this was the rare occasions when Lorraine would stay with her grandparents in New Jersey while her father went off on another “business trip” that, for whatever reason, she wasn’t able to go along with. (Normally because it involved something entirely too dangerous for her to be involved in it.) This didn’t mean she didn’t keep practicing her lock picking or casing out local homes to see if she could point out their flaws and points of entry, it didn’t keep her from picking pockets and stealing jewelry, just to keep her fingers nimble. If anything, it was the time she was alone that allowed her to hone her own skills, find her own grove.

Her grandparents were a trusting, lovely older couple, who were glad they got to spend the time with their young granddaughter, even if their son wasn’t around as often as they might’ve liked him to be. Her grandfather was a plumber, an honest man, and her grandmother, a homemaker, who worked hard to give the girl a proper education, despite the fact that Lorraine spent a large majority of her time gallivanting about with the neighborhood boys and out until all hours of the night.

There was a time when her father was away for so long, gone to god-knows-where doing god-knows-what with god-knows-who, that she thought maybe it was best to just make a life there in New Jersey. In fact, she almost did. She had stopped robbing strangers on the street and using boys to get shoes and jewelry, she had quit pretending to be gathering donations for churches in neighboring towns so she’d be able to have enough pocket change to get into the midnight showing of Rocky Horror. It was almost a relief, because there had always been a part of her that felt awful about lying to her grandparents about where her father was and where they went for months at a time.

She was seventeen when her father came back again, this time with an associate in tow. It wasn’t the first time he’d come home with someone else or that he’d expected her to work with them, but he had no idea that it would be the last. It should have been an easy job, and it would have been, if it hadn’t been for the stranger added into their small crew. It quickly became evident that the other man didn’t play well with others, but more than that, that he wanted to play with Lorraine. His passes became more and more aggressive as the days went forward, going largely unnoticed by her father.

The whole thing came to a head when he entered her motel room one night, quiet and careful and laid beside her while she slept. Distraught and confused, Lorraine fought against him, but was eventually overpowered. It was a shame and anger that she carried with her for two days before she finally concocted a plan of her own. She was too smart and too good to be a part of what was going on and she wouldn’t put up with him any longer. It didn’t take much to drug the man, just a little seduction and slipping something in his drink one night, seeing him to bed and watching as he passed out. She had a plan, and she was going to get free if it was the last thing she did. So she stole his money, his car, cleared out everything he had and left an anonymous tip with the police regarding the job he and her father were going to pull. That’s when everything changed. She was out of the city in a flash, on her way to literally anywhere else to start fresh. It wasn’t hard to change her name, erase every ounce of evidence that Lorraine had ever existed, after all, that was what she’d been trained for her whole life. She could disappear, never look back. She was lindsey now.

The next several years of her life are a blur of fake names and occupations, of torrid love affairs and gentleman callers. She did the only thing she knew how to do to survive: She conned people. She wove webs of lies and deception, seduced high powered men in high powered places. It wasn’t long before she had boyfriends across the country, lavish apartments, designer clothes and luxury cars. No one asked too many questions about where she went or what she did in her free time because the men she involved herself with were often keeping her as their dirty little secret and she liked it.

But eventually that life grew boring. It was what she’d been doing her entire life and she wanted a change, she wanted something… normal. In 2012, a then 26 year old lindsey Whitcomb moved to Boston for the first time. It didn’t take her long to fabricate an extensive resume, to use connections as references, to sweet talk her way into a job as a morning radio personality at a Boston radio station. And as it seemed in her life, for a little while, things were okay. She had friends, coworkers, a normal, every day life. It lasted just over a year, before an uppity repeat caller with a taste for sexist comments finally got the best of her and she lost her cool on the air. Immediate action was taken and she was terminated on the spot. So she left Boston with her tail between her legs, resolving that there was only one life for her, one way to live and she was okay with the idea of that.

There’s something about Boston, though, and she can’t seem to stay away for too long. While jobs and cons keep her busy, she seems to always find her way back there. Tired again and frankly, getting too old to constantly move around, lindsey returned in January of this year, she returned to Boston with no particular plan in mind. Thankfully, she was able to score a job working at a gentleman’s club run by a long term friend and associate of hers and is just trying to build a life… But that doesn’t mean she’s given up her old gig completely.