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They were not being cruel. They were afraid, and they had had longer than I had to learn what it cost.

One hand didn’t move away.

It touched my shoulder, small and warm and trembling. I toppled back down, scrabbling away from whoever it was. The floor was hard and ridged, slick with condensation, and it rattled against my spine.

The hand followed. It did not grab. It simply stayed.

“It’s okay,” a voice murmured, hardly more than breath. “There are only girls in this truck.”

Truck?

I pushed myself off the floor, wiping sweat from my brow as I looked around. There was nothing but a hairline of grey light along a seam in the door. It lit nothing. Only shapes. The edge of a shoulder. A knee drawn up to a chin. The wet gleam of an eye. And breathing from every side, shallow and ragged, more of it than I could count.

Reality detonated. There were only women in the truck, and we were being transported. This wasn’t a movie or a news article. This was me.

My hand flew to my throat. Bare skin. A raw welt where the chain had snapped. The little lioness was gone. So was my mother’s ring. My nails were ragged stumps, the press-ons gone.

The same hand left my shoulder and pressed something heavy into my lap.

I touched it. Cool. Slick. Plastic.

A bottle of water.

I scoffed. The last bottle of water I had accepted had delivered me here.

Then a laugh spilled out of me, cracked and ugly.

Fucking Adrián.

The laugh soured as the memories began to play. I turned his words over in the dark, one by one, and each showed me its underside.

I just think you work too hard and nobody checks if you've eaten.

Auntie asked me that every day. He had known exactly which worry to borrow. The visit to Auntie’s store. Asking about my visa status. Three weeks of patience. Not kindness. Not attention. Research. Every sweet word had been a hook, every question a note in a file.

Somewhere, my check-in time had come and gone. Imani’s thumb would be hovering over a thread of hearts that no longer had an answer.

Finally, the tears came as the hysteria dissipated.

Because I thought of my sisters. My family. All the people I loved and who loved me. Auntie, who believed I was asleep on Imani’s sofa. No one would look for me until morning, and perhaps not even then. The little lie I had told for a night of freedom had become a head start for them.

The thought of never seeing them again made tear after tear flood down my face.

“Lo lamento.” The same feisty voice now whispered.

I’m sorry. I was sorry too. Sorry for all the gullible girls in this truck who had been cruelly tricked by men, as I had. The safety of my family, my sisterhood and my community was all gone. The pain in my face and body merged with the raw agony inside my gut, and it burned.

❦ ❦ ❦

The water was warm and tasted of nothing but plastic. I sipped it slowly because I did not want to vomit and add to what was already here. Past my sorrow and anger at being played and abducted, I needed information. Information was the only thing I could hold.

Forty hours of shadowing at a dental practice had taught me one thing before anything else. Take the history first. Ask where it hurts, then wait.

“How did you all get here?” I asked.

Silence. The engine droned. Somewhere to my left a bottle crackled as someone shifted their grip.

“Armando promised me a new life,” the girl beside me said at last. Her voice was low and rough, and her words slid into Spanish rhythms before she caught them. “After the foster care system let me go, it sounded like a dream come true.”