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I took another drink. It was making my stomach flip, drinking straight vodka so quickly, but I didn’t care. I needed something.
‘Luis?’ I asked.
‘I have him, Ana. But you need to figure something out. You can’t come here – they’ll kill you both. He’s safe. But we need money, passports. You need to help me get him out of Colombia.’
Relief flooded my weary bones, flowing all the way down to my toes along with the last of the vodka in my bloodstream. It was an unfamiliar feeling, to be so terribly sad yet so relieved at the same time. My son was alive. But how long could he survive if the likes of Murphy were looking for him?
I had to do something.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked. Maybe it was all a misunderstanding. Maybe it was all a bad dream.
He coughed. ‘There were witnesses, Ana. People saw. People saw them storm the house, and people saw it burn afterwards. People heard them screaming.’
Oh Jesus. I wished I hadn’t asked.
‘Keep him safe,’ I whispered. ‘Please, Miguel, keep him safe for me.’
Miguel’s voice cracked. ‘He looks like my brother, but he has your eyes, bambina. He asks for you.’
‘He knows about me?’
It was almost too much to bear.
‘Of course he does, Ana. He has a photo of you – remember your senior dance?’
I did remember. The milk hadn’t even stopped leaking from my breasts in the aftermath of Luis’ birth and adoption, but Mama had insisted I go to the dance, get back to normal life. Este had borrowed a suit that was too big and presented me with a corsage I knew his mother had stayed up late the night before making. I’d spent the entire night sobbing in the dark outside the dance hall, as Este held me and promised to find a way to get our baby back. I remembered the photo my mother had taken, just as we were leaving the house. My mother had done my make-up for me. I remembered thinking how odd it was that she was acting so normal, especially when my father refused to even look at me, much less engage in a conversation. In fact, he only said one thing to me that night. He appeared as I was getting ready to leave, slapped me across the face hard enough that I tasted blood in my mouth, and told me, ‘Keep your legs closed, you little slut.’
I remember holding my cheek, in shock. I wasn’t going to have sex. I’d given birth to a baby a week earlier. I was barely walking, let alone the rest of it. And my father was calling me a slut. My mother had pulled me outside and snapped a photo of Este and me. He was squinting at the sun and I was still reeling from shock, a reactionary smile plastered across my face. Karina had a Polaroid camera she’d found at a market, and she snapped a photograph, too, let it spit out of the front of the camera, and gave it to me.
It seemed that Polaroid photo had survived and ended up in my son’s hands.
‘Mariana?’
I snapped back to the present as Miguel’s voice cut through blurry memories of days long gone, feeling the flour dust sticking between my clammy fingers. It was hot in the apartment all of a sudden and I desperately needed some fresh air.
‘I’ll get money. I’ll call you again tomorrow,’ I said to Miguel in a monotone voice. I ended the call abruptly, switching the phone off and returning it to the ziplock bag and finally back into the canister of flour. After I’d done that, I took the dining chair that I’d wedged beneath the front door knob and carried it back to the dining table, staring at the surface where Dornan and I had fucked. I loved him. I loved him so fucking much, and I didn’t want to hurt him. Nausea rolled through me and I swallowed back bile.
Rushing over to the sliding door, I wrenched it open, stepping onto the patio as ocean air hit me. The cold greeted me with a slap that made my skin sting. I breathed deeply, tasting salt on my tongue, wiping floury hands on my skirt. The sea was torrid tonight, churning. It was going to rain. It hardly ever rained in Los Angeles, barren wasteland that it was, but it smelled like the heavens were going to open and dump water any second.
I wondered if anyone had organised a funeral for my family, if there had been anything left to bury. Fire had a nasty way of reducing fully formed people to bones and ash, inconsequential piles of what used to be flesh and blood.
I thought it odd that I wasn’t crying. Maybe the relief of knowing Luis had been spared was making the deaths of my parents and siblings less traumatic.
More likely, I was in shock.
Everything Murphy had said to me, about witness protection and getting out of this place? It had all seemed so good, so of course it was a lie. I felt like a fucking idiot for even daring to consider what he’d fed me as truth. He was a shark, and he’d just tried to convince me he wasn’t so he could take me by surprise and eat me alive while I wasn’t looking. He’d tried to make me trust him.
When something seems too good to be true, it usually is.
I’d never believed that until now.
My parents, my brother, my sister – they weren’t going to be saved. They were already dead. And Christopher Murphy had been in Colombia looking for my son.
I was never getting out.
Murphy’s deception unleashed something primal inside me. He had poked a sleeping beast that been lying dormant for nine years, curled deep in my belly.
I ran into the bathroom and reached the toilet just in time to throw up the contents of my stomach. Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I caught sight of myself in the mirror, and I saw something alight in the recesses of my dark blue eyes.
