I must have looked skeptical because she gave a little bless-your-heart smile as she took out her phone. “Louisa, do not evenattemptto out-ACAB me because mark my words, you will lose. Anyway, this isn’t just any cop I’m calling. I told you, I trust this one.”
Still shaking, I waited until she ended her terse phone conversation. With no further movement from outside, we ventured gingerly back to where we’d come from. “But why isheso different?”
She sighed. “I can’t give too many specifics. I don’tknowtoo many specifics. He has his own cover to preserve. But I can tell you his name’s Emmanuel Wheatley, and he’s been looking into Langer’s organization for some time, based on some of the same suspicions you had. He only needed someone like Alma to help build his case.”
“But what about Daddy?”
“If you tell them what you saw at the house, there’s a better chance of proving he’s not involved, and?—”
“No. There has to be another way.” If I spoke to the police, that meant confessing that I’d seen the one person I was forbidden to see. And if my father got the blame for Resi’s crimes, he could very well end up paying with his money, with his reputation, or with his life. But if he learned that the slave he still owned had crossed the line in the sand he’d drawn, I had no doubt he would find a way to make him pay first, and with everything.
“He—he has a plan.”He’d better have a plan.“Wehave a plan. We just—we need more time.”
“Louisa, we don’thavemore time.”
She was asking, like always, for the one thing none of us could afford. But hadn’t we always managed to make time—even just a minute—when it seemed there was none to make?
“Even just a minute.”
Erica let out a noise that sounded suspiciously like a groan.
I glanced around the room frantically, my wits fully about me again for the first time in many hours. Where was my phone? I thought I’d seen it on a charger on the bathroom counter. Gritting my teeth, I began peeling myself off the sofa.
“But don’t you see that’s what Resi’s counting on? If you talk to the police, yes, you’re endangeringhimand your father. But if you don’t, you’re endangeringus.” Erica glanced meaningfully out to where we’d just come from. At the perimeter of the impromptu safe house that we both knew could be breached at any time.“Alma, and Maeve, and Sloane, and now, the longer we stay here, Ivy, too. And—” She flicked her eyes upstairs.
“The kids,” I breathed. I’d seen what Resi and her helpers were capable of doing to adults. Putting them near children was unthinkable. “Fuck.”
“Do you see that this is beyond what we’re capable of doing on our own anymore? We need the police. And for that, we need Alma. But we also needyou.”
I hiccupped. I now felt like the most selfish person alive. But I still wanted more time.
“Like it or not, Louisa, you and he started something that’s now bigger than both of you,” Erica explained. “This may have all started when boy met girl, but now that others are involved, the calls aren’t all going to be yours to make. Louisa—” Suddenly, her voice cracked. “Some people have sacrificed an awful lot for this.”
Her face had suddenly gone deathly pale. She tried to recover, but she’d slipped up, and she knew it. And I knew it, too.She’d lied.
Milagros was not fine. And Erica was not unbreakable.
“Erica—” I started, but she waved me away, turning her head. It was surreal.
It’s not that I really thought Erica couldn’t be vulnerable. Couldn’t be in pain. It was just that by now, I assumed she must have learned all the ways to cope that no one had ever taught me because no one had ever thought I’d go through anything hard enough to need them.
But how did anyone cope withthis?
“I always knew,” Erica said, taking off her glasses and dropping them on the delicately inlaid end table, “that she and I were on borrowed time. We were already so much luckier than we should have been, luckier thananyoneshould have been. This isn’t a world where people like us get to live in peace for very long. In the end, they always come for you. Theyalwaysmake you pay the price. But I just thought—” Her voice wavered as she swiped at her eyes desperately. “I should have seen it coming. I should have?—”
“Why are youhere, Erica?” I almost leapt up from the sofa again before reminding myself how much it had hurt the last time. “You need to be with her.”
Erica swallowed, fighting back control. “Milagros knows me better than anyone, and she knows—assuming she’s conscious, which I can’t be sure of—why I’m not with her. That has to be enough. The story of slavery is one of endless suffering, and most of it we’re powerless to stop. But this, we can.” She raised her head. “And that’s worth everything.”
“Erica.”
She just blinked.
“You made a promise to Milagros, all those years ago, that you’d come back for her.”
She mostly didn’t move, but she raised her eyes, telling me to go on.
“I think you’d be the first to admit that she didn’t have any real reason to believe it, after what the world had put her through. But she did. And you did. And—” I looked desperately around the room. “And Ivy. Those kids had no reason to expect anything but more abuse from her. She literally inherited them, and she could have done anything with them, or to them. But she chose to love them.”
