Thank you for sharing that the story was unsettling to you. That's not an easy admission for everybody. That feedback is so valuable for me because I as the author got a bit detached from the "emotional flow" of the story because I planned it so rigorously. So it's nice to hear that it worked as intended!
I also can't tell you why this story in particular kept getting voted and commented on. I posted it on launch day. You and Record Chaser somehow kept getting pushed back to the top of the board whereas most launch stories stay buried in the depths of the forum. With Record Chaser this made sense to a degree because the story was getting a ton of views. But You doesn't even have that many views for a highly rated story that has been on the forum for almost half a year now. So it's a story that behaves really weird. Anyway, you probably don't share my fascination for staitical outliers like this one, so I'll stop here.
I would still appreciate a rating for the story.
Sadly, the Community by and large seems to stop rating stories once they end up in the Popular Stories board. Shocker's Fugitives for example has now been for more than three months in the Popular Stories board and has increased its view count from <1600 to over 5700 in the meantime. Almost 400 people registered since then (~60% of our total userbase). But it got only a hand full of new votes (and comments). It's one of the issues that plagues the community.