Jagger squeezed my shoulder and returned to the other side of the room.
I watched my parents’ story unfold through photographs and crayon drawings and report cards and dried flowers, watched them go from a young couple out with friends, their eyes lit with youth and promise, to parents of a newborn.
And then they were a family of three, Bram balanced on my father’s hip while my mom showed a positive pregnancy test to the camera.
I opened the box markedBRAM AND CASSIEand found pictures of Bram holding me in the hospital, a grin lighting up his eyes while I squinted up at him from a squished and bruised face.
And then pictures of us at home — in the old house Bram had had to sell — and pictures of us at the park and pictures of us in the bedroom we’d shared when we’d been small.
I was so lost to the past it took me a second to realize Jagger had spoken to me.
“What was that?” I asked, trying to clear the fog of memory from my brain.
“Look at this,” he held up a foam board, the kind I’d used to display my third-grade science project on density (I’d layered various objects in glass jars, then dropped a coin into each one to see how far it sunk).
Except this one was bigger and sturdier, like something someone would use for a business presentation before everyone used computers.
I set down the pictures in my hand and crossed the room to take a closer look, then blinked in surprise.
“Is that…”
“Yeah,” Jagger said. “Looks like your parents were a lot further along than we thought.”
The board was covered with pictures and documents, red string traveling between places and people, a passport photo, and several documents stampedFOIA.
“They used the Freedom of Information Act to get some of this shit,” Vigo said, staring at the board.
I took it from Jagger’s hands and looked for a spot with better light, then balanced the foam board on a stack of boxes next to the wall.
I stood back to study it and felt the Hawks fall in next to me.
“They’d definitely discovered the Dimitri connection,” Hawk said, his gaze on a black & white picture of Dimitri Kaprolov exiting a stone building.
He was younger — and he had more hair — but it was definitely him, and on the building behind him I could just make out the Kensington Trust sign.
“Who’s that guy?” Vigo asked, pointing to a picture of a slightly younger guy on a yacht.
The photo had obviously been taken from far away with a telephoto lens.
“No idea,” Jagger said. “We can reverse image search it when we have WiFi. Signal sucks out here.”
I took a picture of the guy on the yacht with my phone.
“It’s getting late,” Jagger said. “We should call it for today.”
“Agreed,” Vigo said. “I’ll get the car so we can load everything up.”
Hawk and Jagger started carrying boxes and bins to the front of the storage unit for easy loading while Vigo went to get the car.
I stared at the board in the fading light, trying to imagine my parents pinning things to it, pulling red string from pin to pin, connecting the dark tendrils of a sex-trafficking ring that went back decades.
It was almost impossible, but the evidence was staring me in the face that that was exactly what they’d done. While I’d been going to school, arguing with Bram, skinning my knees, my parents had been working overtime, trying to figure out who was behind the disappearance of girls around Blackwell Falls for decades.
Their lives must have looked ordinary from the outside, but they’d been doing something extraordinary, and my heart swelled with pride when I thought of all they’d risked — all they’d lost — to help people they hadn’t even known.
It put my own risk — my own possible loss — in perspective. I understood why Bram had wanted to protect me, why he’d avoided talking about what our parents had been up to, but I couldn’t go about my life knowing there was an organization like Imperium Fratrum kidnapping women, stealing their lives.
I just wasn’t built that way.
