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‘I’m not going with you,’ I said, his eyes and the headlights appearing in double as the world started to spin around me. I stumbled and fell to my knees, and suddenly there were warm hands on my shoulders.
‘Come on,’ Lindsay said, draping his suit jacket around me as he led me to his car. ‘I’ll keep you safe. I promise.’
‘Where?’ I argued, too weak to fight him. ‘In prison?’
He opened the back door of his Escalade and bundled me in, laying me across the backseat. ‘I’m not taking you in, Mariana,’ he said softly. He closed the door, and a moment later he was jumping into the driver’s seat.
It took me a moment to register the words. ‘Then where are you taking me?’
He pulled away from the kerb, and I lay on my back across the leather seats, the car accelerating so fast it was like we were flying.
‘To a safehouse,’ Lindsay murmured as he navigated traffic. ‘There’s someone waiting for you there, and I promise you, you’re going to want to meet him.’
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
LUIS
I met my mother for the first time when I was born. Briefly, and then I waited another fourteen years to meet her a second time, inside the walls of an FBI safehouse.
She was younger than I’d imagined, but when she raised her eyes to mine, I saw all those lost years in her stricken expression. Her bare feet were cut and bleeding. Her dress was torn and she was covered in blood.
They say you can never remember the first moments of your life. That it’s impossible for the brain to be able to store that kind of information. But there are some things that transcend the realm of possibility, some algorithms too complex for us to explain away with just science. The nights I had spent looking at my mother’s faded photograph paled in comparison to this moment, this flesh and blood, and blood-covered woman who sat before me, as if she’d just fought a battle and barely made it out alive. Maybe she hadn’t made it out entirely. Her eyes were sad. They said she’d lost something very dear to her. That she’d left something behind.
‘Mariana,’ the FBI agent said, grasping one of her hands and placing his other palm on my shoulder. ‘This is Luis. He’s been waiting a long time to meet you.’
My mother started to cry, and it hurt inside my chest that she was so upset. What had happened to her? Had she been trapped somewhere? Had she just escaped?
‘Don’t cry, Mama,’ I said, my throat tight. I was fourteen years old, and I didn’t cry. I wouldn’t cry. But in front of my mother? I wanted to crawl into her lap and cling to her and never let her go.
Her eyebrows rose in disbelief when I said Mama.
‘Luis?’
There are some things that cannot be explained. A child can’t remember his mother’s voice from the day he was born. And yet . . . ‘Your voice,’ I said. ‘I remember your voice.’
That made her cry harder. I chewed on the inside of my cheek. I didn’t want her to cry. I wanted her to speak so that I could hear her voice again.
We sat in stunned silence, observing each other.
‘You look exactly like your father,’ my mother said to me.
I nodded. It was true, I did. I’d seen the photographs. I was his spitting image.
‘But I have your eyes,’ I said to her.
She blinked fat tears, tears that wound a line through the dried blood and the dirt on her cheeks. It was incredible. Like the warrior I’d always envisaged her to be, here she was, risen from ashes, this mythical person who, until this moment, had only existed in hope and a faded photograph I carried around with me like it was my saving grace.
Agent Price nudged me, pointing at the empty seat next to this woman he called Mariana. I stepped over and sat down so that I was next to her.
My mother dropped the agent’s hand and turned to face me, stretching her fingers towards me ever so slowly, almost as if I might disappear if she moved too fast, like smoke on the wind.
‘Can I?’ she asked hesitantly, her eyes darting to my hands.
I nodded, offering them to her. She took them in her hands, drawing a deep, almost choking breath when our skin met. I hated to be touched, hated to be hugged by my aunt or my cousins, hated to have any affection. My whole life, I’d always felt like a weird kid, the outcast, because I’d just wanted people to leave me alone.
But when my mother studied the ridges on my palms, when she turned them over to look at each finger, at my wrists, when she let my hands gently go and pressed her fingertips against my cheeks, it was like someone had poured a balm onto my skin. I didn’t want to shrink away.
‘You’re real,’ she whispered, cupping my chin in her hand.
