Her mother. The porch. The sound the screen door made. The way her father sang wrong on purpose to make her laugh.
The girl behind the eighth door, and what she's going to say to her when it opens.
I listen. I say small things back. I hold her.
I don't check the lock and I don't check her face for cracks.
I let her be exactly as strong and as scared as she is, both at once, all the way to the end of the dark.
At ten to four she gets up and starts dressing.
I watch her put herself together in the dark—the woman who walked up to my gate with nothing, pulling on boots to go back and get everybody she left behind.
"Finn."
"Yeah."
"Whatever happens today." She stops with one boot in her hand. "I already won. I need you to know that."
I sit up.
"I got the answer. I got the life. I got you. I got to say it out loud." She pulls the boot on. "Everything after this is more than I ever thought I'd get. So don't go into that place trying to save me because you think I'll die with something unfinished."
"Mila."
"I'm finished." She stands. "Get them out. Let me worry about me."
She's ready.
I have never been more scared, or more in love, in my life.
"Let's go get your girls," I say.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Mila
The tunnel smells like wet clay and old diesel, and I count my steps because counting is what I do.
Eight hundred and forty-one from the door on Alejandro's property to the ladder on the other side.
A mile of packed earth under a border that means nothing down here, strung with a work light every hundred feet.
Amara's ahead of me. Finn's behind me. Fourteen people moving north in the dark and not one of them talking.
At the ladder there's a man in a barn who says three words to Amara in Spanish and hands up a set of keys.
Then we're in Arizona.
Arizona.
I come up out of that hole into cold air, creosote, and a sky with too many stars in it.
My legs go loose under me. Finn's hand comes flat between my shoulder blades, not pulling, just there, and I get my feet under me again.
"Okay?" He keeps his voice down near my ear.
"Yeah." I make it true. "Yeah. Let's go."
