Chapter 14
She knew he wasn’t joking.
Everything in her said this man would do it.
She could not win against him.
There was nothing available to her except compliance.
When that landed, her eyes went down, her shoulders came apart, and her face gave up.
“I’ll come when you need me. But I’m not moving in here to work.”
That was the last thing she was holding.
If he wouldn’t take it, he’d be pushing her toward the last resort under her shirt.
Ethan had no intention of pushing her that far.
Corner anything docile enough and it turns on you. He understood the principle.
He was curious about what she’d look like fighting — but this was already further than he’d planned to get today.
“All right.” He paused, and his fingertip touched her collarbone and went no lower, though his eyes went straight to her chest. “Although. Whatever you’re keeping in there — don’t bring it again.”
Her heart stopped. How.
He put his mouth near her ear and dropped his voice. “Would you like to know how I found out?” He didn’t hide it. There was something almost obliging in the way he explained. “When you were pressed against me just now. I felt it.”
Lily came out of the house wearing a mask.
Under it her mouth was visibly swollen, and there was a tooth mark on her upper lip that hadn’t faded.
The mask was his. He’d said he was worried she’d be embarrassed. He’d smiled and asked her whether that wasn’t thoughtful of him.
“Thoughtful. He’s a lunatic. A pervert.”
Lily swore under her breath the entire way back across the river.
Jenny was already waiting outside the restaurant, and the tension went out of her face when Lily appeared.
Then she noticed the mask. “What’s that for?”
Lily kept her voice down and put everything into it. “A dog bit me.”
Jenny understood her perfectly and lowered her own voice. “He didn’t — do anything else to you?”
Lily didn’t want her carrying it. “No. Nothing else.”
“So what did you two agree to? He’s not going to come after you again?”
“He said any time he wants to bite, I let him. And in exchange he leaves me alone and pays me.”
Jenny’s face did something complicated. It was, presumably, the first time she’d encountered that particular request.
“What kind of a thing is that to want?”
“Nothing a normal person wants,” Lily muttered.
Jenny was quiet for a while, and then tried again. “I know you left because things weren’t good back there. But at least back there you’re alive. Think about what I said. Please.”
Lily’s smile came out crooked. “You think I don’t want to go home? You know my situation. If there’d been any air left to breathe there, I wouldn’t have taken this road.”
Jenny let out a small sigh.
It was a reason she’d heard many times. For a great many people who come north from Mexico, it’s the whole explanation — no road forward at home, so you gamble on a country that isn’t yours.
“Okay. Be careful. Stay alert.”
She went inside.
Lily turned and looked across the water, at the pure white house sitting among all that brick and timber like something that had been dropped there.
Why did she have to stay in this country?
That went back a year.
She was still in Puebla then, an operations clerk at a digital media company, on a salary that just barely covered her. On the first of June she’d sent a little spending money to her younger sister, Olivia Garcia, who was studying in the United States.
Yes — Lily had a sister. Same father, same mother, and nobody knew.
Their parents divorced when Lily was ten.
Her father took her. Olivia, two years younger, went with their mother.
Two years after that, their mother built a new family.
Lily was twelve. Olivia was ten.
They saw each other less and less.
Before the remarriage their mother would occasionally bring Olivia to visit. Afterward, the visits stopped.
A year later their father remarried too, and had a son.
That same year Lily started at a boarding school.
In ninth grade she saw Olivia among the new intake. One look and they knew each other.
They were both overjoyed. And Lily told Olivia not to tell anyone they were related.
A family history that complicated hands other children a reason to isolate you, or worse, and she wasn’t going to put Olivia in that position.
So to everyone else, they were close neighbors. Lily was the older girl who lived next door.
Lily stayed at the same school through the upper grades, and Olivia followed.
They kept it from their parents and spent four full years side by side.
Having grown up the same way, they leaned on each other, and it made them closer than they’d been as children.
Their father was killed in a car accident during Lily’s first year of university.
She was an adult by then and her stepmother had no obligation to keep her, so she left home completely and worked her way through the rest of her degree.
Her first year out of school, their mother died of an illness.
And Olivia landed in the same position Lily had.
With one difference. Lily hadn’t had an older sister. Olivia did.
So that Olivia could study without worrying, Lily covered everything for four years.
Olivia earned it back. She took scholarships wherever she could to lighten the load, and in her third year she won a government-sponsored place to study in the United States.
They were happy for a long time about that. It felt like the turn — like all those years had finally bought something, and the future had started waving them over.
Before she left, Olivia promised she’d work hard, and that one day she’d make enough money to buy Lily a beautiful house.
What came back instead was not Olivia.
On the first of June, Lily sent the money and it went uncollected.
She didn’t think much of it at first. She was buried at work, Olivia was buried in coursework, and they’d never been in daily contact anyway.
It was the next day, when the transfer bounced back automatically after twenty-four hours unclaimed, that something started to feel wrong.
She still didn’t go to the worst place. She assumed Olivia’s phone had been stolen again — it had happened once already, right after she’d arrived.
And that time Lily had just changed her own number, and Olivia hadn’t memorized the new one, so there’d been no way to reach her.
Lily had nearly lost her mind over it. In the end she’d found her through the embassy.
Having been through it once, she didn’t panic blindly this time.
By the third day there was still nothing, and she couldn’t sit still anymore.
She started doing everything she could think of.
She contacted the embassy. She contacted the university.
On the fifth day, she got an answer.
The university had begun its summer break in late May. Olivia had left campus when it started, and the school had no idea where she’d gone.
