“Hi daddy,” she wrote the next day.

“???” she texted after that.

Jaedan’s older brother and sister had quit trying. He’s gone, they would say. Melissa, their mother, implored Jaedan to move on, too, and stop asking painful questions. “You don’t need to know,” Melissa said.

But Jaedan, just 22, struggled to accept the disconnect between the dad she knew and the man everyone else described. She had attended her dad’s alma mater, Michigan, and occasionally descended into internet wormholes to learn what she could. In pictures, he was smiling and forever young. In videos, he was an all-Big Ten defensive back who played eight years in the NFL. In articles, he was a rising star in coaching. But there was more.

“… hospitalized after standoff,” one of the stories read.

“… a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” read another.

“… the same type of brain trauma,” according to yet another, “as Dave Duerson.”

They agreed to have dinner when he was in Ann Arbor for a friend’s memorial service. As it approached, Jaedan’s mind raced with the usual questions. Why had he forgotten her birthday? How did former teammates bring out a version of him that his own children never could?

And what really happened in New England?

“I still get scared of making him upset,” she said the morning of the service, sitting in an Ann Arbor coffee shop in her Michigan tennis sweats, her curly hair scrunched into a headband.

That afternoon, she changed into a black dress and heels before leaving to pick up her dad. She steered her Kia toward a nearby hotel, her dad climbed in, and they set off for Crisler Center. He said nothing, and for the moment, Jaedan did the same. There was so much she wanted to ask him, even as everyone insisted the truth would hurt too much.

JAEDAN’S EARLIEST MEMORIES of him have been worn away by the years. There are a couple, though, such as when she was 4, sitting high in a football stadium, a molecule in an ocean of green.

“See him?” her mom asked.

It was 2006. Jaedan was watching the New York Jets’ cheerleaders. Little Corwin, her older brother, spotted him first. Then Tayla, her older sister. Look for the 40 painted on the field, she said, then look alllll the way down.

It was Daddy. Even now, the memory feels warm.

No matter a parent’s career, there are a few magical years during which their kids think their mom and dad are superheroes. The belief is that much stronger when one of them coaches football, a conductor in America’s favorite sports orchestra.

“People at school would always talk about my dad,” Little Corwin says now. “If you were a fan, I was the coolest kid ever.”

When Jaedan was 5, her dad left the Jets to become Notre Dame’s defensive coordinator. Fridays at school were a runway show. She wore clovers in her hair, shoes the color of ivy, a T-shirt printed with the 2007 season schedule: Georgia Tech, Penn State, Michigan.

They traveled to Ann Arbor, of course, where the grown-ups all had a strange name for Daddy: “Flakes.”

He was never the biggest or strongest player, the story went, but during his five years with the Wolverines, he went from being thin as a cornflake to a starting safety, a team captain and all-Big Ten.

He spent eight years in the NFL after that, starting in 1993, playing for the Patriots, Jets and Detroit Lions. He smoked teammates in locker-room chess matches and impressed Jets assistants Bill Belichick and Eric Mangini enough that they brought him to the NFL scouting combine to help evaluate talent. A month after his last game with the Lions in 2000, one of his former Jets coaches hired him to run special teams at the University of Virginia.

None of this was a result of talent or luck, his teammates explained to Corwin’s kids. He had done it through smarts and grit.

“With more energy than everybody,” former Michigan player Lance Dottin says. “You used to say to yourself, like, ‘How the hell can he do that?’”

Things peaked in 2008, when Notre Dame was 4-1 and humming. Schools reached out, asking Brown whether he was interested in being a head coach. It made sense: He was smart and charismatic and ran a hybrid scheme that relied on a fierce pass rush and trust in studious defensive backs like Corwin was. At 38, he looked like a head coach, too: shaved head, trimmed goatee, wide smile.

He stayed with the Irish anyway.

“I don’t need money,” he told the South Bend Tribune. “What I need is for people around me to be happy.”

And they were. The family moved into a four-bedroom house in the suburbs, close enough to Chicago that Corwin could visit his parents, spacious enough for Daddy to show off his salsa dance moves. Jaedan danced with him, cackled at his corny jokes, sang along as he butchered songs by Tupac and the Beatles. During games, she kept a penny in her pocket, rubbing it for good luck.

“Come on,” she told herself. “We have to win.”

After games, Daddy always took his time, socializing with opposing coaches and encouraging players from both teams. Then, win or lose, he would jog toward his family, stopping long enough to wrap each of them in a hug, a snapshot from an all-American life.

IN 2010, DADDY SPENT THE YEAR in Massachusetts, coaching safeties for the Patriots. Melissa and the kids stayed in South Bend.

The plan was for the family to join him after the season. But when they visited early in the 2010 season, Dad seemed … weird. He smelled funny and hadn’t been shaving. The season is a grind, he said, so occasionally he would sleep on an air mattress in his office. The rest of the time he lived in a basement apartment he rented. He seemed exhausted.

Then, out of nowhere, he would burst into tears.

Dottin, Brown’s former Michigan teammate, lived in nearby Cambridge, but he didn’t hear from Flakes often. When he did, it was 3 or 4 in the morning. Brown was never much of a sleeper, even in college, with teammates arguing over who had to room with him before road games. But lately, Dottin said, Brown was murmuring about arguments at work before abruptly ending the call. “They’re listening,” Brown kept saying.

Each morning, Brown met Pepper Johnson, a former Jets teammate and the Patriots’ defensive line coach, in the sauna to unwind. Coaching can be a grueling, joyless profession that attracts oddballs and misfits, so Johnson assumed Brown was just lonely. It would explain why players had seen him sitting alone in his car, staring into space.

Jaedan wrote letters to her dad, decorating the envelopes with hearts drawn in purple and orange crayon. Her class had six caterpillars, she reported in one, and they were undergoing dramatic but unseen changes while inside their pupae.

“We got to see one of the cocoons turn into a butterfly,” Jaedan wrote. “Bye! Go Patriots!”

But she discovered later that Daddy tore the letter in half. Work was stressful, her mom explained. A few of his players on the Patriots were rejecting his coaching, and Coach Belichick was pressuring Daddy to fix it.

A few months later, Belichick summoned Brown to his office. It just wasn’t working out. By March 2011, he was headed home.

Together in the house, Mom and Dad argued more, about money or his new tattoo of the grim reaper or because he demanded to search her phone or laptop. During a visit to Ann Arbor to see Melissa’s parents, Brown paced from room to room before tearing a smoke detector off the wall.

“They’re after me,” he said.

“Who’s after you?” asked Billy Harris, Melissa’s dad. Corwin wouldn’t say.

He disappeared for hours or days, and one night Jaedan climbed into bed with her mom. Corwin stormed in after midnight, started yelling and, after calming down, told Jaedan he was becoming a monster. Other nights, he burst into Jaedan’s room and, with an urgent voice, told her they had to go. Now! He carried Jaedan to his car, his arms still strong beneath her, and buckled her into the back seat next to her sister.

“Where are you taking us?” Tayla asked. But he wouldn’t say. Daddy just drove, going so fast that Tayla was crying. They would be safe once they reached Chicago, he said. He offered nothing more.

When he saw headlights in the rearview, Daddy pulled over and let the vehicle pass. Then he floored it, honking the horn and flashing the high beams. Tayla was screaming now, and eventually Daddy slowed down. Without another word, he turned the car around and drove home before gently putting his daughters back to bed.

One Friday morning in August 2011, Jaedan was in the family room with the rest of the family. Corwin noticed Melissa looking at her computer and insisted she hand it over. She refused, and Corwin ripped it from her hands.

Jaedan and her sister ran outside and climbed onto the trampoline. Melissa stepped through the sliding glass door, but Daddy grabbed her by the hair, sending her phone flying before dragging her back inside.

“Don’t!” Jaedan screamed. Her brother tried to get between them, but Corwin pulled Melissa across the floor, toward the stairs. Then he pulled a 40-caliber pistol from his waistband as he tried to drag his wife up the stairs. Panicked, Jaedan’s 13-year-old brother ran into a bedroom.

A neighbor pleaded with the girls to come next door, but Daddy didn’t allow them to leave the yard. Jaedan screamed for Chance, the family’s miniature labradoodle, to come outside. She didn’t know that a police car was creeping down the street or that Daddy had sent her brother out to get rid of the cops.

There’s no problem, Little Corwin was assuring the officer, nothing that can’t be fixed. He was still pleading with the policeman when Jaedan heard a gunshot from inside the house, followed by a long and haunting silence.

THE GIRLS SPRINTED TO THE NEIGHBOR’S HOUSE and hid in the basement. Jaedan was convinced her mother was dead. She soon heard a heavy knock on the front door, assuming it was Daddy.

But it was a police officer, alerting the neighbor that everyone was safe. The pistol had misfired, and after a police negotiator asked through a bullhorn about the status of any hostages, Corwin had stepped outside to insist there were no hostages. Still holding the pistol, he walked his wife and son to the door, and they hurried outside. Corwin stepped back inside and lowered the shades.

The officer walked the three siblings to a nearby cruiser, and Jaedan saw a news truck parked near their driveway and police with guns trained on the family’s home. “Please don’t hurt my dad,” she said.

Someone drove the family to a nearby fire station, where the kids played pool with firefighters, ate pizza and watched a movie. Jaedan had no idea that, a few miles away, Daddy was still pressing the nose of his pistol into his ribs.

It had been about six months since Dave Duerson, another former NFL safety, had died after shooting himself in the chest. The death of Duerson, a starter on the famed 1985 Chicago Bears defense, laid bare the struggles some players faced during retirement. Before his suicide, Duerson had asked family members to donate his brain so it could be examined for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease linked to repeated hits to the head.

Corwin pulled the trigger. He had planned to fire a hollow-tipped round through his chest, piercing his heart but preserving his brain, he said later. But the pistol kicked down, and the bullet entered his abdomen and missed vital organs. This time, police rushed in and initiated first aid before an ambulance took Corwin to the hospital.

Melissa, cradling Chance, rejoined the kids, and they spent the night at a nearby hotel. Jaedan says her mother, assuming local news stations were reporting on the standoff, didn’t let them turn on the television. Harris, the kids’ grandfather, picked them up the next day and took them to their home in western Michigan, while Melissa stayed in South Bend, reported for work and pretended nothing happened. The kids played in the sand along Stony Lake, and Jaedan couldn’t wait to tell her dad about riding a jet ski. But when she finally talked to him, he barely spoke.

He just kept muttering about how even the family was in on it.

CORWIN BROWN PLEADED GUILTY but mentally ill to charges of felony confinement and domestic battery. An attorney told the court that Corwin’s symptoms were similar to those Duerson had reported, and two doctors who evaluated Corwin submitted conflicting reports about his capacity to stand trial. Melissa begged the judge for leniency. As part of his plea deal, Corwin was put on probation.

In April 2012, former NFL safety Ray Easterling died by suicide, a month before legendary linebacker Junior Seau fatally shot himself in the chest. Seven months after that, Kansas City linebacker Jovan Belcher shot his girlfriend before killing himself in a parking lot of the Chiefs’ facility. All were later found to have exhibited signs of CTE, with Seau’s brain being confirmed with an advanced case of the disease.

“It’s happening to more players,” Jaedan heard Melissa say one day. “It’s going to keep happening.”

By the time Jaedan was a teenager, her dad had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and paranoid schizophrenia. He occasionally visited a therapist, and though his doctor suspected football may have played a role in his symptoms, it was impossible to know for sure.

Still, Jaedan wondered what had happened during his season with the Patriots. It was as if her dad just left and the figure who returned was scary and unpredictable. Little Corwin accused his dad of giving up. Tayla called him selfish. Melissa said he wasn’t even trying. If Jaedan defended him or asked questions, Melissa insisted it was better that she didn’t know.

Once Little Corwin was off at Michigan, Melissa and Corwin kept arguing, but Jaedan assumed the role of peacemaker.

“It’s not his fault!” she snapped at her mother. The family says Corwin receives disability benefits from his playing days but that he is among the hundreds of former players who applied for — and were denied — benefits from the league’s concussion settlement.

The tension grew, and Jaedan’s frustration followed her to tennis practice. Sometimes she ignored her coach or talked back. Knowing she wouldn’t behave this way in front of her dad, Melissa started bringing Corwin with them. Jaedan thought he liked filling a basket with tennis balls, but mostly he just sat in the bleachers.

During one session, Jaedan’s coach asked her to do something, and she refused. “Shut the f--- up!” Corwin thundered. A second later, he acted as if nothing had happened.

One evening the sisters were arguing again, and Tayla threw a book at Jaedan. It missed, but the thud woke up Daddy, and now heavy footsteps were coming down the hall. A door flew open, and Corwin wrapped his hands around Jaedan’s throat.

He started screaming, and so did Melissa, begging him to stop. Jaedan couldn’t breathe. Finally he let go, looking surprised at his surroundings, before quietly heading back to bed. Jaedan spent the rest of the night crying, but the next morning, Melissa got her to practice on time.

Jaedan’s eyes were puffy, and the other girls noticed and started whispering. She just let them talk because, rather than ask what happened, they just assumed it was because Jaedan broke up with her boyfriend.

IN MARCH 2020, Tayla sent an Instagram reel to Jaedan. It was a clip from an NFL game two decades earlier, Detroit at Tampa Bay, scratchy ESPN footage and muffled audio. Buccaneers wide receiver Keyshawn Johnson caught a deep pass across the middle, secured the ball, and — boom. A defender crashed into Johnson, the ball and Johnson’s helmet went flying, and the play-by-play announcer praised the hit.

“Corwin Brown laid him out,” Mike Patrick said. Johnson looked dazed, but being that there was no medical tent or independent neurotrauma consultant waiting, Johnson returned for the next possession.

Melissa’s parents have a framed photo of the hit at their lake house, but Jaedan had never seen the video. She was so excited that she texted her dad to ask about it.

“The hits you dream about,” he replied.

Jaedan wanted to keep the conversation going, so she kept asking about football. She learned from her dad about “Bloody Nose Lane,” which is what he called the middle of the field, and how the entire sport used to celebrate devastating, occasionally crippling hits. Dad’s high school coaches gave out helmet stickers for big collisions; during his senior season, he had at least 40. He once hit a ballcarrier so hard that his own field of vision went blue, and you should have seen the other guy.

“That’s a good thing,” he told Jaedan. Then he went silent again. Days passed, then weeks.

When Jaedan left home for college, she rarely heard from her dad. If he visited Ann Arbor for an important tennis match or a funeral, it wasn’t her father who greeted ex-teammates or current Michigan players. It was Flakes: gregarious, joyful, overflowing with passion.

“They’re able to get this side of him that we’re not able to get,” she says. “It’s upsetting because I have almost no memory of him being like that.”

Desperate to learn more, she read news accounts of her dad’s past. The brainy recruit who excelled at math, graduated near the top of his high school class and wanted to be an architect or a lawyer; the fearless Michigan safety whose Rose Bowl performance earned him the nickname “Bad News Brown”; the emotional center of every team he played on.

Jaedan kept reading, discovering an online journal that, like so much else, had never been discussed. It was Little Corwin’s. She knew that, after a year at Michigan, he had abruptly left school and returned home. Nobody said why. Now she was reading about her brother’s feelings of powerlessness after relatives, in the wake of their father’s standoff, had assigned Little Corwin to step up as man of the house.

The young man described an increasing “noise in my head.” Bracing for the next outburst or midnight drive, he conditioned himself to avoid sleeping and to smile through intensifying feelings of guilt and despair.

“Every open window, Every high ledge, Every balcony,” he posted in 2017, “Turned to a doorway to that dream.”

Letters to friends followed, then pictures of himself and siblings as toddlers, contemplations of the end. In December 2017, he had attempted suicide.

AS LONG AS THE TEXTS were about football, Daddy usually texted back. The game had been his profession, his identity, his escape. Jaedan learned it could also be a portal into his mind.

“Do u think Michigan can win,” she sent him last year before the Wolverines played Texas.

“Nah they gonna get killed,” he replied.

“They need you out there lol,” she sent. “Or Me.”

Minutes would pass, but then she would see the bubbles that indicated typing.

“Do u remember anything from living in New York,” he wrote. “Like the time I jumped in the canal with all my clothes on. Or when I used to bbq in the backyard.”

This was the good stuff, and though football chatter ignited most of their exchanges, occasionally they expanded. Politics. Family. The best way to make stir fry. Jaedan learned that her dad loved coaching but not the long hours and time away from home. He never cared about being a millionaire. He just wanted to create a situation in which his family never had to worry.

“Do u know who junior seau is,” he asked Jaedan last summer.

“I’m just seeing if you up to date.”

She had read all about him, learning that Seau was by no means alone. In 2023, the CTE Center at Boston University announced that, of the 376 brains of former NFL players it had examined, nearly 92 percent showed evidence of the disease. Some were among the sport’s biggest names: Hall of Fame running back Frank Gifford, Super Bowl champion quarterback Ken Stabler, legendary halfback and Heisman Trophy winner Paul Hornung.

For every victim, there were friends, spouses and children who dealt with the fallout of the confusion, paranoia and aggression that often preceded players’ deaths. They were also among those encouraged to keep it quiet, the denial of suffering being a key tenet of the game’s mythology. CTE itself was discovered in football players just two decades ago, and as the NFL refused until 2016 to acknowledge a link to the disease (and often still denies medical care and money owed to affected players as part of a 2015 lawsuit settlement), there aren’t many formal avenues toward support. And because CTE can be confirmed postmortem only, many families assume their situations are hopeless.

Last year, Jaedan was reading about Duerson when she found herself on the CTE Center’s website. It has specific resources for memory care, mental illness and neurological disorders. If only she could get him to Boston, she told herself, there would be hope.

She asked her mother and siblings what they thought about her reaching out. Little Corwin said it made him nervous. Tayla said it felt risky. Melissa — who, through her children, declined The Washington Post’s interview requests — told Jaedan there was no upside.

“She was protected from a lot,” Tayla says now, “and I was worried that she was going to get really hurt. And I worried that her relationship with my dad would get to a point where she recognizes him even less.”

A dozen years after the standoff in Northbrook Shores, Jaedan started typing. She wrote messages to staffers at the Concussion Legacy Foundation, an advocacy group that connects families to the CTE Center, and included a brief biography of her dad and a description of his symptoms. This wasn’t something the family talked about, but Jaedan wrote that her father was “presumably suffering from CTE.”

Before she could change her mind, she pressed send. She followed with a text to her dad. “Would you pledge your brain for research for after you pass?” she wrote.

The old picture of Flakes, in his Michigan uniform and smiling, stared back. A moment later, she saw the bubbles.

EACH FALL, THE CONCUSSION LEGACY FOUNDATION holds a gala in Boston. Among other things, it’s a gathering for families who have lost a relative to CTE. Last year, for the first time, a family dealing with a suspected case was invited.

“I’m going to be speaking there,” Jaedan told her dad in a text. He didn’t reply for two days.

Tayla and Little Corwin were coming, too, she told him. They were still working on Mom. Would Daddy consider joining them? They could make a weekend of it, see the city, maybe see some old buddies from the Patriots.

“No,” he replied. “I don’t wanna go back to Boston.”

“Why,” she asked. He didn’t respond.

On a Friday morning last fall, Melissa and the siblings joined other families for a tour of the CTE Center’s brain bank. They changed into gowns and put on gloves before entering a small room. On a table was a human brain, and a doctor offered to let visitors hold it.

Jaedan volunteered, cradling a three-pound mass that once contained a vast network of neurons, cells and complexity. She contemplated the brain’s potential for invention and destruction, its capacity for beauty and horror. Nobody knows whose brain it is, which is part of the point. It could be anyone’s — including, someday, their dad’s.

The doctor pointed toward the frontal lobe, explaining that football is especially punishing to that part of the brain and that those with CTE had previously displayed aggression, poor impulse control and paranoia.

Jaedan looked at her mother and siblings. Processing the doctor’s words, they were sobbing. A chaperone guided them outside the room, and after the tour, the group returned downtown.

“I just felt so bad,” Jaedan says. “I felt like it was my fault that I was putting them in that situation again.”

At the gala hours later, Jaedan and her family walked onto a stage as a video about their family played. “I had to be responsible,” Little Corwin said in the video, “for making sure that he knew that no one was following us, that everything was safe and that …”

A wall of emotion hits, causing him to pause.

“… it was all going to be okay,” he continues.

A long ovation followed, then a line of well-wishers. When Jaedan got back to the table, she noticed a text on her phone’s display.

Daddy wanted to see the video. Jaedan hesitated.

“Girl send me the video,” he wrote.

She sent it, then waited as several uneasy minutes passed.

“That was good,” he finally wrote.

“R u okay?” she replied.

“Yea it was sad,” he said. “But I got the best kids.”

FOUR WEEKS LATER. Thanksgiving morning. Daddy was in Chicago, spending the day with his parents. Not long before kickoff between Chicago and Detroit, Jaedan texted him from Ann Arbor.

“Where do u think Aaron [Glenn] will go as a head coach,” she wrote.

Glenn, the Lions’ defensive coordinator at the time, played in the same Jets secondary as Corwin, and the two remained friends.

“The jets or saints,” Jaedan’s dad replied.

“Have him add u to his staff,” she said.

Jaedan knew it wasn’t that simple, but she liked fantasizing about her father someday returning to coaching. He texted back that his disability payments would disappear and that his psychological problems make work difficult. Still, she said, time has passed. He has more support than he did.

“Do u remember when u told me u were a monster,” she asked. “I was trying to tell you you weren’t.”

A moment later, her father texted back.

“One day,” he wrote, “I will tell you the story of when I was gonna kill belichick.”

Jaedan stared at the display, trying to make sense of the words.

“You were actually going to kill him?” she said.

“Yea,” he replied, “him and about eight or nine other people.”

Jaedan ran into the other room and found Little Corwin. Daddy just said this crazy thing, she told him, something about Belichick. Overhearing the exchange, Jaedan would say later, Melissa shrugged and pointed out that her husband used to threaten her all the time. But in an effort to protect Jaedan, nobody discussed it.

Now, Jaedan says, Melissa suggested that her daughter end the conversation with her dad before being told something she couldn’t unlearn.

“You need to tell him you’re not ready,” Jaedan says her mom said.

But she had to know. She texted him anyway, and he kept replying as, for the first time, he told an almost unbelievable story. When Corwin was a young coach at Virginia, he explained, a friend from Chicago got arrested in an FBI sting. For reasons he would struggle to explain, he began wondering whether he was whom the authorities were actually tracking.

At Notre Dame, he confronted a graduate assistant, demanding he admit that he was an FBI informant. By the time he joined the Patriots’ staff in 2010, he suspected that even Melissa and Little Corwin were cooperating with federal authorities. So were his new colleagues. After staff meetings, Corwin said, he would leave his phone behind to record other coaches’ conversations. When Belichick brought in a guest speaker who worked in government, Corwin began suspecting his boss was part of the plot.

“We need to talk to somebody,” his friend Dottin says he told him.

But, Corwin said, Belichick had already suggested that. Instead of traveling to a Patriots game in October 2010, Corwin was told to stay home and meet with a sports psychiatrist. This only strengthened Corwin’s suspicion, he said, that Belichick was cooperating with the FBI. He believed there was only one way to stop it.

Processing what her dad was telling her, Jaedan says, she cried for hours. She was reading “League of Denial” at the time, a book about the NFL’s refusal to admit that football-related hits may cause CTE. Garrett Webster, the son of Hall of Fame center Mike Webster who has become known as patient zero, had been exposed to much of what Jaedan and her siblings had.

Learning she wasn’t alone was comforting, she says. It convinced her that her dad wasn’t a bad person. He’s just sick. More severely than she had imagined.

“I’m sorry daddy,” she texted back. “That must’ve been so scary.”

“I thought everyone was against me,” he replied, “and I didn’t have any help or support.”

“I wish I was older and could’ve helped you.”

ON A RECENT DAY IN CHICAGO, Corwin walks into a coffee shop and removes a Michigan beanie. Jaedan asked him to meet with a reporter, and before he sits, there’s a question he has to ask.

“You don’t work for the FBI, do you?” he says. The answer is no, and Corwin sits and takes a sip from the hot chocolate his daughter ordered him.

“I don’t f---ing know,” he says, smiling. “It’s just what I think.”

Over the next 90 minutes, he answers questions about his mental state, the standoff, his supposed plans to harm Belichick and others. He says he had occasional paranoid thoughts and unexplained anger while he was coaching the Jets, but his symptoms intensified when he got to Notre Dame, where he was surrounded by co-workers he didn’t know.

By the time he joined the Patriots, he says, Corwin even suspected Melissa and Little Corwin of working with the FBI. He says he would leave his phone behind after coaching staff meetings to record what colleagues were saying, coming to suspect Belichick and Johnson as part of the plot.

“Dude, I’m spending too much time sitting and talking with you,” Johnson says he fired back, “for me to be plotting against you.”

Corwin says he often noticed white trucks following him to his apartment, which is why he often slept at the office. Radio stations would cut out, he says, before a voice spoke to him and told him things to watch out for. When Dottin once visited Corwin in Foxborough, Corwin pointed out white trucks and insisted Dottin turn off his phone.

Twice that season, Corwin says, he attempted suicide. Then, he says, he met with a “street dude” from Cambridge, having been introduced to this individual through Dottin years earlier when he played for the Patriots. Corwin asked this person for a gun, he says, and outlined what he planned to do with it.

Corwin says now that, before a meeting of Patriots defensive backs, he would enter the room and approach Belichick at the lectern. He imagined shooting Belichick before turning the gun on Johnson, followed by safeties Brandon Meriweather and Patrick Chung.

“Shoot myself,” he says. “I didn’t think about my kids, not once. I didn’t think about Melissa. All I could think of was this is how I’m going to make it stop, to show them that they can’t do this to me.”

Corwin says the man in Cambridge refused to give him a gun, and Corwin returned to work for the remainder of the season. Was this person’s judgment the only thing that prevented a mass shooting? Or just another of Corwin’s delusions?

“I was screwed up,” he says. “Back then, I thought everybody else was screwed up.”

Dottin says he learned later of Corwin’s plot from their mutual associate, suggesting the attempt to procure a gun was “very real.” A Patriots spokesman says the organization had no knowledge that Corwin may have been considering violence, and Belichick, who now coaches at the University of North Carolina, did not respond to questions sent to an athletic department spokeswoman.

Johnson says he had no idea his longtime friend considered violence against him. “I tried to help him,” he says, “as much as possible.”

On this day in Chicago, Corwin’s leg bounces as he talks. His eyes follow passing cars through a window, and he says that his mind still suggests that he’s being followed. He says his medication allows a different part of his mind to remind him it’s probably not true.

Still, he says, he cannot rule out the possibility that some people close to him continue to work with the FBI. Dottin is among his current suspects. There are only two people in his life he has never doubted: his mother, still in Chicago, and Jaedan. When this purported investigation began, Corwin says, she would have been too young.

“I got to be able to protect her,” he says.

This instinct remains powerful, he says. But not quite as strong as it was years ago, when he says he would go to Jaedan’s sporting events, past a sign that prohibited firearms, and sit alone in the bleachers with a gun tucked into his coat.

JAEDAN GRADUATED FROM MICHIGAN last year and immediately went into the family business. She’s a student assistant coach for the Wolverines’ women’s tennis team, and one chilly afternoon recently, Jaedan packed her car in Ann Arbor and texted her dad.

“R u coming home,” she wrote. He had spent the previous few days at his mom’s.

At least he was responding, so she climbed in and started west. For more than a dozen years, nobody dared ask Corwin about the past or his mind’s dark suggestions. But when Jaedan started probing, digging deeper and refusing to give up, it was neither anger nor defensiveness Corwin felt. It was relief.

“My first instinct was: ‘Whatever you got to do, go do it,’” he says. “I can’t be hurt any more than I’ve already been hurt. I can’t hurt anybody. I’m not going to hurt anybody. If some good can come out of it, especially with this concussion thing, that’s good.”

Corwin says he would like to reconnect with Tayla and Little Corwin, but he doesn’t know how. Little Corwin, who still lives with his parents after moving home nearly a decade ago, compares his interactions with his dad with that of a roommate, says he is unsure whether he’s ready. Maybe someday, he says now at 27, but “I cannot put everyone on my back again.”

Jaedan doesn’t remember much of that, either, which may explain the relentlessness of her crusade. She wants to know her father, to tell herself that she has given him everything she has, even if the road ahead is more frightening than fulfilling. She just has to know.

Which, today, is why she’s heading home. It’s a long way, time to think about the things she hopes to ask Daddy next. Each question, each text exchange, is a potential bridge, she says, that may someday lead the two of them to Boston.

“I’ll be with you,” Jaedan says, rehearsing the moment, “the whole time.”

“I want you to be okay,” she texted later.

“I promise I would never let anyone hurt you,” she sent after that. “I am here for you and would never put you in harms way.”

She sees the text bubbles, reminding herself that she never expected to get this far. So when and if the time comes, she will propose the drive to Boston as a road trip. Just a daughter and her daddy together, talking and laughing and singing along to the Beatles and Tupac, the miles and hours blurring by as they press toward whatever it is that’s waiting around the next bend.