Page 61 of Counting Backwards

I rose from my seat and moved toward the intercom box.

“For fuck’s sake,” Isobel said.

“I’m sorry, what?” I asked.

“I’ll do it. But you have to keep me anonymous. Someone in here’s going to figure out who’s involved. You got to keep an eye on me the whole time, from start to finish. I amnotgetting deported over this.”

I hurried back into my seat and opened my notebook again.

“We will not let that happen,” I said as I took Isobel’s hand and squeezed. We stared at each other for a moment, and a million little messages seemed to pass between us—grief for all that had been lost, acceptance of the challenges ahead. A lump formed in my throat as I thought how bittersweet it was that Isobel and I had really come to understand each other. She squeezed my hand back, like she knew just what I was thinking.

With a quick nod, I pushed past the lump and told her, “Now, let’s get to work.”

***

Driving back to the city, I was exhausted by the back-to-back interviews and the thought of all the work that lay ahead. Merging onto the highway, I found myself ensconced in thick, slow-moving traffic. As I inched along, I thought of all the wrongdoers I’d listed to Isobel earlier. This case was drastically different from anything I’d worked on in the past. Representing corporate defendants—big companies that sold insurance or frozen vegetables or Bitcoin—was something I could do with one hand tied behind my back. At the bottom of every case, those clients were mostly just fighting over money. But filing a class action, in an urgent effort to stop violent and irreparable damages to vulnerable plaintiffs, was completely new to me. I found myself questioning all over again whether I was equipped to handle it. As I worried I might fail them all, I tried to ignore Vance’s voice in my head, gaslighting me. But pushing away all the doubts he’d been stoking since I first told him about the case was proving difficult.

Thinking through the steps of the case, I decided I’d try to get attention from the press quickly. Should the complaint play well in the court of public opinion, my clients might have a fighting chance of winning this thing. But what would happen until then?I considered all the discovery we’d need and found myself nearly gasping for breath. We’d have medical records, correspondence, financial information, daily logs from the facility, all of DeMarke’s records, and whatever else I could require the medical facility to produce.

Amid cases like these—the ones with enough defendants to field a football team and an enormous number of documents to scour—Tate had been a real godsend. She could lead a team of paralegals in the initial stages of document review like nobody’s business. I again thought of Vance saying that I was doing these women a disservice by taking the case without more help. On this point, he probably was right.

Now that I’d let the fear seep in, it began to run wild in my mind. What if my actions somehow made everything worse for the women inside? Was I just being selfish and using their case to make myself feel better about who I was and where I came from? Thoughts began swirling like a violent storm, and I felt my breath growing shallow. I couldn’t have a panic attack in the middle of the highway, even if the cars were moving at a snail’s pace. I was approaching an exit—if I could just hold it together until I made my way up the exit ramp. My car moved up one inch at a time. I just tried to breathe deeper and deeper. Finally, I pulled to the side of the road and cut the engine.

I leaned my head against the wheel and shut my eyes, breathing slowly and allowing my tempestuous thoughts to run free. My throat burned, and I felt nearly paralyzed with fear.

I couldn’t say how much time passed before a knock at the window made me jump. There, beside my window, was a police officer. Because of course there was.

I rolled down the window and looked up at him. He was a Black man deep into middle age, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a slight paunch at his middle.

“Everything all right here, miss?”

“Yes, sorry, Officer,” I said, wiping under my eyes with my knuckle. “I was upset about something. I just needed a minute.”

“This isn’t a safe place to stop your vehicle,” he said. “Cars coming off the highway here are still passing by fast. They mightn’t see you in time.” He motioned toward the traffic light up ahead. “At that light up there, you make a left, and it’ll take you to Dina’s. You’ll see it on your left. She’ll fix you right up.”

“To Dina’s?” I asked, confused.

He nodded without offering an explanation, tapped the side of the car twice, and walked away.

I couldn’t imagine what he meant, but I had to go in that direction to wrap back onto the highway anyway.

As I turned off the access road onto a busy thoroughfare, I passed only a couple of storefronts before I saw a big magenta awning with “Dina’s” written in flowery cursive. The name was positioned diagonally across a drawing of a frosted cupcake. It was a fun-loving design, with confetti sprinkles and a maraschino cherry making the awning aggressively perky.

I scoffed. I should have been used to other people belittling my feelings, especially men, but I bristled all the same. He was sending me to a freaking bakery? My problems were hardly the kind that could be fixed by a pretty cupcake.

That wasn’t going to cut it.

Then I had a jarring thought: Maybe I was just like that cop. There I was, thinking I was really going to help these women, even though I didn’t have the right experience and had never represented an entire class of plaintiffs. Suddenly my plan seemed like a metaphorical cupcake—a cute idea but woefully inadequate.

If I really wanted to make a difference for the detained women, I should probably hand over my findings to an actual immigration lawyer. But if I abandoned them like that, Isobel and the othersmight see it as another reason not to move forward. I’d promised to stand by them, and I couldn’t renege on that. As I merged back onto the slow-moving highway, I considered another option: a way to give my clients the best of both worlds. I laughed out loud as I realized the cop might have been pretty insightful after all. He’d offered me the best he could, given the circumstances. And maybe sometimes offering your best was enough.

When I finally drove over the bridge into Manhattan and merged onto the FDR Drive, my dashboard lit up with an incoming call. Vance’s name flashed on the screen, and I hesitated to answer. He might be calling to say he was never coming back, to tell me we were officially over, soon to be fighting over the custody of a child. Of course, custody would only be an issue if he wanted anything to do with our baby—something I wasn’t sure of now that he knew the whole story.

“Hello?” I said tentatively.

“We need to talk.” Vance sounded breathless, his voice echoing. He was probably in the stairwell at his office, seeking privacy for whatever vitriol he intended to spew.

“Yeah,” I answered, girding myself.