Robby sucked in a breath, taking Calder’s hand, like they’d come to a scary part in a horror movie. It felt like one at the time. Calder tried to distance himself from the story. Just state the facts.
“It was almost eleven before my parents started to worry. She was usually home by then. The store closed at ten on weeknights, and it was a Wednesday. My mom worried my sister’s car might have broken down somewhere between the store and the house. There were no cell phones back then, so dad got in the car to go look for her. But her beat up Camaro was still in the lot. All the lights were off in the store, and the doors were locked. My dad got our neighbor, Ed, and the two drove around for hours hoping to find her, but she was just gone.
“I slept through most of it until the police arrived. The lights woke me up. The officers assured us that she’d probably just gotten a ride from friends and they’d talked her into going out. My parents told them that wasn’t something she’d do, but they just dismissed them. When she didn’t come home, they implied she’d run away. It was clear to my parents the cops weren’t going to look too hard for her.
“Things just sort of fell apart after that. My mom lost her job, my dad became obsessed with finding my sister and started to fall down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories. They loved me but it was clear that there was a big hole in our lives. They sort of ignored me. I understood, though. I missed her too. She was my sister. She used to read to me and do all the voices. Sometimes, she’d take me out after mom and dad had gone to sleep and we’d get milkshakes at the drive thru.”
Calder fell silent, gathering his thoughts. It seemed strange to talk about her after a decade, like conjuring a spirit he’d expelled years ago. Guilt ate at him. What had she ever done to Calder to make him force her out of his memories? Nothing.
“Are the ashes your sister’s?” Robby asked softly before placing a kiss on Calder’s bare chest.
“No, angel.” That would have been too easy. “I guess I was obsessed with the case too, and I fixated on being a Texas Ranger. I wanted to help find missing people. Living in El Paso, they immediately tried to put me in a position working border patrol, but I didn’t want to spend my life chasing after people who just wanted a better life. But that wasn’t why I was there. They put me on a special task force dealing with human trafficking. It’s a huge business in those parts, not just with Coyotes preying on vulnerable people trying to get into the U.S., but American girls and young children are also sold into the sex trade over the border.
“I realized pretty quickly there was a chance this is what happened to Megan. I didn’t share my theories with anybody, but I kept my eyes open. I knew what happened to girls like my sister. Best case scenario, she was dead. Worst, she was a slave, drugged and beaten, bought and sold. Girls in that world didn’t last very long. We didn’t rescue nearly as many girls as we lost, and the ones we did save had years of recovery ahead of them. I convinced myself we were heroes. We were fighting the good fight. Doing everything in our power to get to the people at the top.
“We caught a break when one of the girls leveled up in the organization. Sometimes, when the girls aren’t…profitable anymore, they’ll turn them into recruiters. Her name was Jennifer, and she didn’t want to recruit girls. She couldn’t stomach the idea of having anybody go through what she went through. She wanted out. She came to us for help. She wanted us to get her out. Said she could give us names, dates, meeting spots, tunnels. The wheels move slowly on these kinds of deals, and in the meantime, Jenny had to do her job so the bosses didn’t get suspicious. She hated it, but if she didn’t meet her quota, the punishments were severe, so we were all forced to go on with our lives and pretend we weren’t allowing girls to be raped and drugged and sold as property. A week after Jenny came to us, my parents died in a car accident. I threw myself into my job.
“Backpage launched a few months later. A sort of sleazier version of Craigslist, if you can believe that. Backpage allowed traffickers to place ads for girls, most of them underage. There were pictures, descriptions, all written in code. We checked ads daily, extracted girls when we could. But one day, while looking through these ads, one of the photos was a reflection of the girl holding the camera. A girl who looked just like Megan. An older version of her, but still her. I showed the ad to Jenny, and she swore she didn’t know the girl in the photos or the girl taking the picture but that she did know Elizer, the boss, had started using the site for his girls. I asked Jenny to try to get information from him about the girl, but she said it was dangerous, that he’d know something was up. I begged her to just try, to just see if he’d give up anything, even if it was only to say she wasn’t one of his girls.”
Calder took a deep breath and let it out. “The next day, we found Jenny in the parking lot of an abandoned building, barely breathing, beaten to within an inch of her life. He’d branded her face. The branding wasn’t new, she’d already had an E branded on her hip. Marking up her face was a message.
“We tried to find family members or even friends but there was nobody. She wasn’t brain dead. She could breathe on her own. But she just wouldn’t wake up. I used to visit her every day after work, but she never regained consciousness. I quit the Rangers. I couldn’t keep fighting against the tide. For every girl we rescued, fifty more were taken. Trafficking is a huge business, and there are just too many of them to stem the flow. I moved out here. Linc and Jackson gave me a job. I kept paying Jenny’s medical bills. It was the least I could do. Last month, she got a lung infection and they just couldn’t control it. And then she died.”
Robby sniffled, warm tears falling onto Calder’s chest. “I’m sorry.”
Calder glanced down. “Why are you sorry, angel?”
“Because you’re sad. Because you lost your sister. Because you feel guilty about this girl who had a horrible life.”
“She got hurt because I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that a girl who I saw in a reflection was my long lost sister. I didn’t even know if my sister was alive or if my sister had been trafficked. Statistically speaking, she was dead twenty-four hours after she went missing. I put my far-fetched hope over a real girl’s life.”
“You don’t know that he beat her up for asking a question about a photograph. She was sucked into a super dangerous world whether she wanted to be or not. You didn’t put her in that situation, whoever kidnapped her did. We’ve all done stupid things that have consequences.”
Calder lifted Robby’s hand to his lips and kissed his palm. “What stupid thing have you done, angel?”
“I abandoned my brothers and sisters to a monster. I saved myself and left them behind,” Robby said softly.
“Do you have a lot of siblings?”
Robby nodded against Calder’s chest. “I had seven when I left. Four of them were older than me. My mom was pregnant when I came out to them, so I suppose I have at least one more now.”
“They have each other though, right?”
“My parents are very Old Testament with their punishments. Kneeling on rice. Being beaten with a belt. Being dunked in ice water and made to stand outside for hours. Nobody is too young for punishment.”
Calder’s heart twisted in his chest. “You are barely twenty-one years old. What were you going to do? Sue your parents for custody?”
“I could have done something. Anything really. But I didn’t. I saved myself and never looked back.”
Calder tugged Robby’s hair and kissed him gently. “You need to stop being so hard on yourself.”
“You should learn to take your own advice,” Robby told him.
“Maybe so, angel. Think you can sleep now?”
“Can I sleep right here?” Robby asked, throwing an arm and leg over Calder.
“Of course.”
