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"Okay," he agreed, nodding.
From there, I moved to the other women, asking questions, searching faces.
And as I moved along, my hope began to crumble.
By the time I got to the last girl, there were tears swimming in my eyes.
She—all of seventeen—reached out, placed a hand on my arm, asked me if I was okay.
She, this young girl who had been snatched off the street, was feeling sorry for me.
"I thought my sister would be in this container," I explained to her, swatting one of the tears away. "I have been looking for her. And this was my last hope."
"Maybe we saw her," the first woman, Victoria, said in English. "There were many women," she added. "More than here."
"Show them the picture," Luca suggested, guiding me back toward the opening of the container to speak to Victoria.
Grateful that they'd be willing to help after they'd already been through so much, I scrambled for my phone, swiping through my pictures, then holding out the image to Victoria.
Who promptly looked like I'd struck her in the face.
"What is it?" I asked after sharing a confused look with Luca.
"This is her," she said, taking my phone, face stricken.
"My sister. Yes."
"No. This is her. This is the woman."
"What woman? Luca asked, a little more put together in the moment than I was as my mind spun with the knowledge that they had seen her. Even if she wasn't there, they'd seen her. She was likely still alive somewhere. "Where did you see her?" he added.
"In Venezuela. In my hometown."
"With the traffickers," Luca clarified.
"She is the trafficker," Victoria snapped, shoving my phone back into my chest so hard it knocked out my breath as my hand automatically reached to grab it.
I misheard her.
Right?
I had to have misheard her.
Because any other explanation was simply not possible.
"No," I said, head shaking, refusing to believe it.
"Yes. Yes. She's the one. She lured us. She made us follow her with a scheme."
"What kind of scheme?"
"To do a survey for money. She said they would give us good money for our time. And then she led us away from town, and men came and shoved us into trucks. She is the woman."
"Are you sure?" Luca asked, his voice only half-audible to me right then, my own thoughts screaming too loud to hear much of anything else.
My sister?
A trafficker?
