“There have been no transactions at all on the family’s cards,” Andreas tells me, coming up behind me.
I expected as much. Her uncle hasn’t been seen by the neighbors in over a day. Not a single pair of eyes caught anything out of the ordinary, and the headache I’ve been carrying for the last twelve hours comes back, blurring the edges of my vision.
I haven’t slept since Camila told me what she did, and this is a reminder to myself to deal with her too.
“She talked about a professor from high school, Gustav or something. Maybe he knows something.”
“On it.”
“Oh, and find everything you can on Camila Fuentes and make sure it goes public,” I tell my best friend, without inflection.
“Absolutely everything I find?”
“Absolutely everything.”
I want her destroyed. I want the university to force her resignation. I want her to feel what it’s like when your life loses all its color without warning, because that’s what she did the moment she pushed away the only person who had been warming my existence.
Sebastian and Karina are my family, but Amalia is the one who made me realize how alone I had been before her.
“I’ll handle it now,” is all he says.
It’s easy to tell which side of the room is hers and which is her sister’s, just from the colors. Where Lupe has muted tones, Amalia has five different colors on the bedding alone. Where Lupe’s desk is covered in makeup, a hair straightener, and handbags, Amalia’s holds three containers of colored markers, her laptop, a stack of books against the back, and a basket full of hair clips.
Without meaning to, my hands move to her clips, all of them different shapes and colors, and I pick one up.
It’s the one Javier touched, I realize, and I close my fist around it.
Where are you, baby?
Three Months Later
Itry to focus on the code in front of me, shutting out the world around me in the café, but the music in my headphones and the view outside keep pulling my thoughts away.
Three months ago, on that ill-fated afternoon, Julia came back into our lives.
For the next few days when she was sitting in the hospital, Maksim and his brother Roman, the Russian pakhan from Chicago, held Lupe in a secure location until Julia was able to walk on her own.
She never blamed Lupe for pointing that gun at her. And honestly? Neither do I. I know the man who pulled the triggermanipulated her, I know he paid with his life for what he did to so many souls, and I know we started to heal. As a family.
But there are days that I feel like everything happened two minutes ago.
I can still feel the blood on my hands from when we rushed Julia to the hospital. I can still see Maksim’s face when she went into surgery, the kind of despair that doesn’t make a sound. I still remember Max’s eyes when he told me thattíoFelipe was gone and how my chest cracked in that second.
Julia gives us space and doesn’t smother us. Most of the time it seems to me that Lupe is simply going through the motions, but how could it be any different? The betrayal I felt is nothing compared to everything she went through, and no matter how many times we tell her it’s going to be all right, I know her. She won’t stop blaming herself, and she’ll bury it all under a mask of“I’m fine,”and I don’t know how to help her.
There is no remedy for everything that happened. The man responsible is dead, but the consequences of his actions are still reverberating, like a chain of dominoes that hasn’t finished falling.
Maksim has offered me a part-time position with their organization, which is working to pull as many victims as possible out of the trafficking network his adoptive father built, and I genuinely feel like I’m doing something that matters.
But then there are moments like this one, watching people walk down the street, talking, laughing, each moving in their own direction, when I think about how completely our lives changed in those twenty-four hours.
I’m glad we have Julia back, but my greatest regret is thattíoFelipe never got to hold her, not even once.
He was the one who, week after week, sometimes with our hands in his, walked into the police station to ask whether they had any news about Julia. He was the one who put posters ofher face all across Puerto Vallarta, hoping someone had seen her. And he was the one who, ten years ago, started lighting a candle on the windowsill every single morning. He believed that in doing so, Diosito or the Universe would guide her back to us.
“You look conflicted.”
When I lift my eyes I see Weston, one of my schoolmates, sitting next to my table with a coffee in hand.
