Saw the fear in their eyes, the resignation, the desperate hope that maybe, just maybe, whoever buys them won't be as bad as what they're running from.
One girl, barely nineteen, told me she owed money to the wrong people.
Card sharks, she said.
They told her she could work off the debt or they'd kill her little brother.
She chose this.
Another said her family sold her to pay off gambling debts.
Said it so matter-of-factly, like families do this sort of thing all the time.
Maybe they do, in whatever world she comes from.
A third wouldn't speak at all, just stared at the wall with the hollow eyes of someone who'd already left their body behind.
I recognized that look.
I saw it on my mother's face in the months before she died.
The look of someone who's given up.
I told them I'd made a mistake.
That I'd trusted the wrong woman at a bus station in Little Rock.
I didn't tell them about the Sanctuary.
About Elder Jacob and the wedding that was supposed to happen two weeks after my twenty-third birthday.
About my mother dying in childbirth because the elders forbade hospitals, forbade doctors, forbade anything that might save her.
About the years of being told my only value was in my future obedience, my eventual children, my ability to submit.
About Father Thomas' sermons on the wickedness of independent thought.
About the punishments for asking questions.
About the way they married off girls at eighteen—sometimes younger—to men three times their age and called it God's will.
I didn't tell them that when Sarah approached me at that bus station, when she offered safety and shelter, I actually thought I'd been rescued.
That God had finally answered the prayers I wasn't supposed to say.
Prayers for escape. For freedom. For a life where I wasn't property.
Turns out God has a sick sense of humor.
"Eden." Margaret's voice sharpens. "We need to go. The reception has already started."
I can hear it now.
Music drifting from somewhere beyond these walls.
Classical. Elegant.
The kind of thing that plays at fundraising galas and museum openings.
