Counting Backwards

20

Jessa

April 22

Once again in the Hydeford parking lot, I was sitting in my car waiting for Dustin and hoping he hadn’t changed his mind about coming.

I was scheduled to interview two of Fern’s four contacts, and I had basically begged Dustin for one more interpreting session. He was reluctant, but I pulled on his heartstrings until he caved. Except now, as the meeting time was approaching and he still hadn’t arrived, I worried his fears about undercutting his position at the firm had gotten the better of him.

I hoped not, because these interviews were crucial. With four new women who’d agreed to testify, albeit anonymously, plus Jacinta, others might finally come forward too. I felt more compelled than ever to convince Isobel and Denise to be part of this. They deserved to be heard and at least get some modicum of justice.

I looked down at my stomach, still flat, and rubbed a palm across it wistfully. It had been three days since I’d heard from Vance. The day after our argument, he’d sent a text saying to reach out in case of a medical emergency, but otherwise he wanted no contact. I kept checking my phone for a follow-up text saying he just needed some time, or that his departure wasn’t permanent, but there was nothing. My dream of the perfect family had almost come true, but now it appeared that was all it’d ever be—a fantasy.

I felt a single tear leak from my eye, but I hastily wiped it away just as Dustin pulled up beside me in a bright orange rental car.

“They don’t make it easy to find this place,”

he said as we stepped out of our separate cars. Even though it was April, it didn’t feel like spring yet, and I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my wool coat.

“It was good of you to come all this way,”

I said, taking in his freshly shaven face and the crisp white collar of the shirt beneath his open parka.

He twisted from side to side, stretching his back in that way of his, and laughed lightly. His eyes darted to the ground and then back up to me. “I guess I find it pretty hard to say no to you.”

I felt a flash of surprise at his words, both in their kindness and in their implied intimacy. I raised my eyebrows and tried to think of the right response, but then he seemed to backtrack.

“And you can be one pushy-ass attorney when you need something.”

I twisted my lips in disbelief. “That’s it? You’re here because I’m pushy? I don’t think so. Talk all you want, but I know you don’t regret trying to protect these women. I saw the way you reacted at Jacinta’s house.”

As I said it, I realized it was true. Dustin had clearly been deeply affected listening to Jacinta. “Like it or not, I see you, Dustin Ortiz.”

“Whatever.”

He rolled his eyes and turned toward the entrance, but I could hear the smile in his voice. He motioned that we should make our way inside. “You don’t have to rehash everything you said on the phone. I cleared the afternoon, but I really won’t be able to do this again. I mean it. As important as this case is, crucially important, I don’t have seven years of goodwill at the firm under my belt like you do. I also don’t have the same freedom to devote time to a pro bono case, as much as I wish I did. I have some financial hurdles to clear first.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

I waved a hand in the air and swatted away his words. “You’ll be back.”

I stopped at the entryway and reached out to pull open the heavy door, but Dustin grabbed my wrist, stopping me.

“Jessa,”

he pleaded, his eyes holding mine. “I’m serious. My dad has been having some serious health issues, and I’ve been sending money to my parents every month. I can’t slack off at the office when this job is the only thing paying the bills.”

He took a deep breath. “I really can’t keep doing this, no matter how much I enjoy being in your company.”

“I’m really sorry to hear about your dad, I am,”

I said, “but let’s be real. My company has never been something you’ve enjoyed. I’m not completely obtuse.”

“Yes, Jessa, you are.”

He pulled me back from the door, making it clear he had more to say. He looked down at me for a moment before he began again, his hand still clasping my wrist. “If I’ve been a dick to you, it’s only because I can’t figure out how to act around you. I haven’t been trying to make you hate me so much as trying to protect myself from getting close to you. I mean, look at you.”

He gestured in my direction like he’d finished making his point.

“I don’t know what you mean,”

I said cautiously, my mind coming up with too many possible scenarios of what he was trying to say.

“Even the first time I met you . . .”

He shook his head as if he were saying something obvious. “I walked into the conference room on my second day, and there you were, holding court and dissecting every last facet of Odeon’s legal strategy like you were in the Matrix, remember? I was mesmerized. You’re whip-smart, but you don’t lord it over anyone. You’ve clearly got an incredible friendship with Tate, but you’re also kind of closed off, like people have to earn it with you before you let them in. You have this quiet confidence about you, and you’re so freaking competent that every case you touch becomes a slam dunk. Add in those big eyes of yours, your hair . . . I was crushing on you hard. When I found out you were married, I guess I put up some walls. I don’t think it was even a conscious decision. Acting like a bit of a bastard just put a little more space between us and made it easier for me to share the air with you. I didn’t want to be pining away over a married woman, and I can admit now that I was pushing you away intentionally. But then you went and turned into this bleeding heart, and I guess I couldn’t do it anymore.”

Then he shrugged, while I stared at him in shock. “I’m not trying to put you in an awkward situation. Just being honest.”

We regarded each other for a long moment as I tried to decide how to respond. A look of panic flashed briefly across his face, like he wished he could take it all back. In another life, I would have been thrilled about attracting someone like Dustin—a successful, good-looking, and apparently very caring guy who worked his butt off to help support his parents. But I did, in fact, have a husband. At least, I hoped I did.

“I don’t believe you,”

I finally said.

“You think I’m making this up?”

He sounded incredulous.

I put my hands on my hips and continued to study him.

“If you’ve been rude in order to mask some alleged feelings for me, or to snuff them out or whatever, why have you all of a sudden started acting nicer?”

It was entirely possible that he was just manipulating me for some reason I hadn’t yet figured out.

Dustin nodded. “Fair. Leave it to Jessa Gidney to find the holes in any argument.”

I thought I heard a fondness to his tone.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“It was that day in the car,”

he said. “When we drove out to Brooklyn to talk to Jacinta. I saw that you were struggling with something, and . . . I don’t know, I just didn’t want to cause you any more distress, no matter how insignificant. Even though you didn’t want to discuss your personal business with me, you were clearly feeling something very deeply. As usual, I admired your passion, and I decided during that car ride that I didn’t want to add anything else to your clearly full plate.”

I was floored. All this time I thought he was a callous frat boy. I had the urge to knock against his chest to see if the other Dustin Ortiz was hiding somewhere inside. I’d been so wrong about him in so many ways. Something tugged at my heart while he spoke, almost pulling me toward him. But like he said, I was married. Married. And I couldn’t give in to the pull. Not when my marriage was hanging by a thread. My loyalty had to be to Vance, even if he was AWOL.

Before I could think of what to say, Dustin shrugged again like he’d just finished telling a funny little story—not laying bare his secrets. “Let’s get in there.”

He turned back to the entrance, and I followed behind, wondering why my life seemed to be getting more complicated with each passing day.

The meetings with Romina Ignacio and Yamileth Navar went just as Fern had predicted. Yamileth arrived at the visitation room dressed in the same blue jumpsuit I’d grown used to seeing at the facility. She had wavy brown hair she wore loosely around her pale face. I knew already that Yamileth was thirty-four years old and had been subjected to a procedure at the hands of Dr. Choudry that left her sterile.

With Dustin interpreting, Yamileth explained that, like Isobel, she’d not been told anything about a hysterectomy until after she’d woken up. She had been under the impression they were removing a cyst from an ovary, and she swore she’d never given consent for anything else.

With each word of Yamileth’s that Dustin relayed, I felt my skin growing itchier. I tried to imagine being trapped in a doctor’s office without the ability to leave of my own free will. The table full of surgical tools. The locked doors.

“She asked the nurse for an interpreter, but they didn’t bring anyone,”

Dustin said, repeating Yamileth’s statements.

“How did you know they wanted to do anything at all without an interpreter?”

As Dustin repeated the question in Spanish, Yamileth nodded like she’d been waiting for me to ask.

“I have a few words in English,”

she answered through Dustin. “‘You’re sick,’ the nurse told me. The only other words I understood were, ‘Doctor fix,’ and when I asked for the interpreter, they said there was ‘no time.’ They finally got the interpreter after the procedure to explain how I should care for the incision. That’s how I found out what happened to me.

“There was one woman,”

Yamileth told us as Dustin interpreted, “Stella. Her bed was next to mine, and we sat together at every meal. They told her if she made a complaint about the clinic, she would have to spend another seven years in prison.”

“Where is she now, your friend Stella?”

I asked, thinking maybe she would also be willing to join the class action if she understood she could do so anonymously.

Even though I didn’t understand the Spanish words that Yamileth said next, the anger came through loud and clear before Dustin translated.

“She disappeared. Nobody told us what happened to her.”

The meeting with Romina, Fern’s other contact, was different. Unlike the other women, Romina had not been operated on. She explained in a mix of English and Spanish that she had been given a shot of Depo-Provera, a contraceptive injection meant to make a woman sterile for several months. The doctor injected her without explaining what was in the shot. She only found out when she climbed back into the transfer van with a Band-Aid on her bicep and one of the other women asked if she’d gotten “the birth control shot.”

When Romina got back to Hydeford, she asked the attending nurse what she’d been given. The nurse checked the file and confirmed it.

Romina was awaiting a hearing on the appeal of her deportation order. She begged us to keep her name private, lest her participation influence the outcome of her case. I wished I could do more to reassure her, but why would a woman in Romina’s position trust anyone at all?

After we finished the meeting, I walked with Dustin toward the exit to say goodbye. I had to go back in for my appointment with Isobel, but Dustin’s work was done.

“So that went as well as we could have hoped, I think.”

I still felt awkward from our earlier conversation.

Dustin nodded as he opened a locker near the facility’s entrance and removed his messenger bag.

“Yup.”

He didn’t meet my eyes as he slung the bag over his shoulder.

“Listen,”

I said, but he held up a hand to stop me.

“No.”

He shook his head. “Let’s not make this weird. I said what I said. I’m just a guy who’s more comfortable laying it all out there. I know there won’t be anything between us.”

He swallowed hard before a playful glint crept into his eyes. “Especially because you promised to leave me alone now so I don’t lose my job. Not everyone has years of savings and your stellar résumé, never mind an investment banker spouse to get them through times of unemployment.”

I didn’t want to tell him I actually might not have my banker spouse anymore, that I might have successfully destroyed my marriage. I let my eyes rove over Dustin for a long moment. It was appealing, the idea of seeking comfort from him. Maybe any man who wasn’t always angry with me would have been appealing at this point. And Tate had been right. Dustin was a good guy, not just a handsome one. But I couldn’t give up hope that Vance might come back to me, not yet. The last thing I needed was to complicate matters further by thinking about another guy.

“Thank you,”

I said, offering him a regretful smile.

He nodded once more, and I watched as he walked away.

A few minutes later, I was back in the meeting room greeting Isobel. I noticed a small grease stain on the sleeve of her jumpsuit and wondered how often the uniforms were washed. When the door clicked closed behind the departing guard, Isobel took the seat opposite me and offered me a tight smile, the kind that said she wasn’t pleased at all.

“You’ve got to stop this,”

Isobel said, “coming in here over and over just to ask me about my hysterectomy. It’s my business, and I told you already, I’m not comfortable making a public fuss about it. I got my family to think about.”

“I’m not here to pressure you,”

I rushed out. “I just thought you’d like to know that five women have now agreed to join a class action.”

“A class action?”

Isobel let out a little laugh. “Denise told me she called you Erin Brockovich a while back. She meant it as a joke, but look at you now.”

Isobel leaned back in her chair and gave me an approving once-over. “You’re really trying to stick it to them, huh?”

“I have to do something and do it without exposing any of you. Some of the women will be listed on the complaint as Jane Does, so we’ll have Jane Doe #1, Jane Doe #2, and so on. If you wanted, you could add your name to the action as another Jane Doe.”

I ran a hand over my own abdomen as I spoke. “Or not. It’s up to you, but I wanted to keep you informed.”

Even though I hoped so deeply that Isobel would decide to join the fight, I couldn’t force her. If she wanted to sit this out, I would respect her wishes. I was well aware that I had absolutely no idea what it was like to walk five steps in any of these women’s shoes. But I did know what it felt like to dream of a family. I hoped that if ever someone robbed me of that, I would still have the will to fight. But who could say? I prayed Isobel would find that will within herself.

“Who exactly are we suing?”

Isobel asked. “The government?”

At hearing her say “we,”

I tried not to smile.

“A lot of people. The defendants, at least so far, will be Hydeford Detention Center, DeMarke Corrections, Dr. Choudry, Pinelands, the director of the local ICE field office that oversees this facility, the secretary of Homeland Security, and the director of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I’d like to add more employees at the clinic and several individual guards too, but we’re not quite there yet.”

“People here are going to go crazy if you really file a complaint.”

I sensed a warning in her tone.

“Somebody has to do something about what’s happening in here.”

“And why is that somebody going to be you?”

Isobel challenged me.

“You sound just like my husband,”

I said without thinking.

“He doesn’t want you doing this?”

Despite my usual efforts not to discuss my personal life with clients, I was so raw I couldn’t suppress the urge to say a little something about what was happening with Vance.

“He thinks I should have more proof before I start blowing up everything in my own life to start something he calls a crazy crusade. But I know what it is to want a baby. I miscarried last year, and I don’t know if this one . . .”

I trailed off, realizing I had just accidentally revealed my pregnancy to Isobel too. The last thing I wanted was to make her feel worse about her own infertility.

“You’re pregnant?”

she asked. “I shouldn’t be surprised with the way you’ve been rubbing your belly since we sat down.”

I yanked my hand down to my side.

“My husband,”

I said, “thinks if I get too stressed, I’ll lose this baby too. The arguing has been endless. He left, and I honestly don’t know if he’s ever coming back.”

“Yikes,”

Isobel said, taking in a sharp breath and regarding me.

I gave a little shrug, suddenly self-conscious, and Isobel shook her head.

“No, don’t do that,”

she said. “Don’t act like it’s no big deal. I’ve been real with you. Now you be real with me.”

She continued studying me. “Tell me something,”

she said. “Why does it matter to you so much that we bring this case?”

I thought for a moment, trying to put my emotions into words. I wouldn’t tell Isobel about my family history. That was simply too much. I was still struggling to face it myself, and it was hardly the most important part of this picture anyway.

“If you don’t stand up for yourself,”

I finally said, “people will keep getting away with it, taking control of women’s bodies and making choices for them they have no business making. We all come at these decisions with our own personal histories. When I was a little girl, my mom used to button up my raincoat for me on wet spring mornings, singing a song about ‘one button, two buttons, three buttons, four.’”

My voice cracked as I chanted the words, picturing my mother in those moments. “I often imagined myself doing the same thing for my own child one day, bouncing my shoulders to the rhythm in the same goofy way. And now I think about all the women in here who had their own dreams when they were little girls, and how those dreams are being ripped away from them. Nobody else has the right to decide which ones of us are fit to bear children, which ones of us are ‘good enough.’ What does that even mean? This isn’t about individual worth or merit. It’s about our rights.”

Isobel sighed heavily, but she didn’t respond.

“We have to stand up for ourselves and for each other,”

I repeated, my voice rising. “Think about your daughter. She’s going to make her own judgments about who her mother is. Who do you want to be for your child? I know who I want to be for mine.”

Isobel stared back at me, her face blank, and I worried I had gone too far.

“Listen,”

I said, my bravado dimming, “I know you only wanted a lawyer to help with your deportation. I won’t bother you about this again, and I’m really, truly sorry if I’ve been too pushy.”

I closed my notepad and put the cap on my pen.

“I’ll set up an appointment to prep for your next court appearance,”

I told her. “We’re good until then.”

I rose from my seat and moved toward the intercom box.

“For fuck’s sake,”

Isobel said.

“I’m sorry, what?” I asked.

“I’ll do it. But you have to keep me anonymous. Someone in here’s going to figure out who’s involved. You got to keep an eye on me the whole time, from start to finish. I am not getting deported over this.”

I hurried back into my seat and opened my notebook again.

“We will not let that happen,”

I said as I took Isobel’s hand and squeezed. We stared at each other for a moment, and a million little messages seemed to pass between us—grief for all that had been lost, acceptance of the challenges ahead. A lump formed in my throat as I thought how bittersweet it was that Isobel and I had really come to understand each other. She squeezed my hand back, like she knew just what I was thinking.

With a quick nod, I pushed past the lump and told her, “Now, let’s get to work.”

* * *

Driving back to the city, I was exhausted by the back-to-back interviews and the thought of all the work that lay ahead. Merging onto the highway, I found myself ensconced in thick, slow-moving traffic. As I inched along, I thought of all the wrongdoers I’d listed to Isobel earlier. This case was drastically different from anything I’d worked on in the past. Representing corporate defendants—big companies that sold insurance or frozen vegetables or Bitcoin—was something I could do with one hand tied behind my back. At the bottom of every case, those clients were mostly just fighting over money. But filing a class action, in an urgent effort to stop violent and irreparable damages to vulnerable plaintiffs, was completely new to me. I found myself questioning all over again whether I was equipped to handle it. As I worried I might fail them all, I tried to ignore Vance’s voice in my head, gaslighting me. But pushing away all the doubts he’d been stoking since I first told him about the case was proving difficult.

Thinking through the steps of the case, I decided I’d try to get attention from the press quickly. Should the complaint play well in the court of public opinion, my clients might have a fighting chance of winning this thing. But what would happen until then? I considered all the discovery we’d need and found myself nearly gasping for breath. We’d have medical records, correspondence, financial information, daily logs from the facility, all of DeMarke’s records, and whatever else I could require the medical facility to produce.

Amid cases like these—the ones with enough defendants to field a football team and an enormous number of documents to scour—Tate had been a real godsend. She could lead a team of paralegals in the initial stages of document review like nobody’s business. I again thought of Vance saying that I was doing these women a disservice by taking the case without more help. On this point, he probably was right.

Now that I’d let the fear seep in, it began to run wild in my mind. What if my actions somehow made everything worse for the women inside? Was I just being selfish and using their case to make myself feel better about who I was and where I came from? Thoughts began swirling like a violent storm, and I felt my breath growing shallow. I couldn’t have a panic attack in the middle of the highway, even if the cars were moving at a snail’s pace. I was approaching an exit—if I could just hold it together until I made my way up the exit ramp. My car moved up one inch at a time. I just tried to breathe deeper and deeper. Finally, I pulled to the side of the road and cut the engine.

I leaned my head against the wheel and shut my eyes, breathing slowly and allowing my tempestuous thoughts to run free. My throat burned, and I felt nearly paralyzed with fear.

I couldn’t say how much time passed before a knock at the window made me jump. There, beside my window, was a police officer. Because of course there was.

I rolled down the window and looked up at him. He was a Black man deep into middle age, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a slight paunch at his middle.

“Everything all right here, miss?”

“Yes, sorry, Officer,”

I said, wiping under my eyes with my knuckle. “I was upset about something. I just needed a minute.”

“This isn’t a safe place to stop your vehicle,”

he said. “Cars coming off the highway here are still passing by fast. They mightn’t see you in time.”

He motioned toward the traffic light up ahead. “At that light up there, you make a left, and it’ll take you to Dina’s. You’ll see it on your left. She’ll fix you right up.”

“To Dina’s?”

I asked, confused.

He nodded without offering an explanation, tapped the side of the car twice, and walked away.

I couldn’t imagine what he meant, but I had to go in that direction to wrap back onto the highway anyway.

As I turned off the access road onto a busy thoroughfare, I passed only a couple of storefronts before I saw a big magenta awning with “Dina’s”

written in flowery cursive. The name was positioned diagonally across a drawing of a frosted cupcake. It was a fun-loving design, with confetti sprinkles and a maraschino cherry making the awning aggressively perky.

I scoffed. I should have been used to other people belittling my feelings, especially men, but I bristled all the same. He was sending me to a freaking bakery? My problems were hardly the kind that could be fixed by a pretty cupcake.

That wasn’t going to cut it.

Then I had a jarring thought: Maybe I was just like that cop. There I was, thinking I was really going to help these women, even though I didn’t have the right experience and had never represented an entire class of plaintiffs. Suddenly my plan seemed like a metaphorical cupcake—a cute idea but woefully inadequate.

If I really wanted to make a difference for the detained women, I should probably hand over my findings to an actual immigration lawyer. But if I abandoned them like that, Isobel and the others might see it as another reason not to move forward. I’d promised to stand by them, and I couldn’t renege on that. As I merged back onto the slow-moving highway, I considered another option: a way to give my clients the best of both worlds. I laughed out loud as I realized the cop might have been pretty insightful after all. He’d offered me the best he could, given the circumstances. And maybe sometimes offering your best was enough.

When I finally drove over the bridge into Manhattan and merged onto the FDR Drive, my dashboard lit up with an incoming call. Vance’s name flashed on the screen, and I hesitated to answer. He might be calling to say he was never coming back, to tell me we were officially over, soon to be fighting over the custody of a child. Of course, custody would only be an issue if he wanted anything to do with our baby—something I wasn’t sure of now that he knew the whole story.

“Hello?”

I said tentatively.

“We need to talk.”

Vance sounded breathless, his voice echoing. He was probably in the stairwell at his office, seeking privacy for whatever vitriol he intended to spew.

“Yeah,”

I answered, girding myself.

“I can’t now,”

he said, “but in a couple hours. Please tell me you can meet tonight.”

I sighed loudly, allowing Vance to hear it, but then agreed. “Just tell me when and where.”

“I’ll come to the apartment. Around eight thirty. I have to run.”

As the call disconnected, Vance sounded like he couldn’t stand another second of hearing my voice. It was a new wound at a difficult moment in our relationship, perhaps our complete unraveling.

* * *

When 9:00 p.m. rolled around and Vance still hadn’t appeared, I began to wonder if he’d changed his mind and no longer wanted to talk. A call letting me know as much might have been nice, but maybe such courtesy was simply too much to hope for with the way things were between us.

I was sitting on the couch with my computer in my lap, scrolling through websites about fetal development. I landed on a page that detailed an average baby’s growth from week to week, comparing the size of the fetus to various common items, mostly foods. Since I was just a few weeks along, our baby would only be the size of a grain of rice or a pomegranate seed. I smiled as I read that at this early stage, the baby would resemble a tadpole. Thinking of my offspring as a nascent amphibian was equal parts wonderful and gross. Reading further down the page, I learned that in order to hear the fetal heartbeat before twelve weeks, doctors would often perform a transvaginal rather than an abdominal ultrasound. I hadn’t realized that’s what I was in for when I scheduled my follow-up with Dr. LaRusso. Would Vance come to that appointment? The thought of him standing beside me reeking with disdain while a doctor maneuvered a wand inside my body brought new meaning to the word awkward.

The sound of a key at the door startled me. When the door opened and I saw Vance’s face, I was hit with a wave of longing that nearly knocked the wind out of me.

He was dressed in black slacks and a blue shirt, the one patterned with tiny diamonds that I’d helped pick out at Bloomingdale’s the year before. The shadow along his jaw was dark, as was usual for this hour of the evening, but his eyes were bright. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought he looked happy to see me.

“Hi,”

I said stiffly, moving my laptop to the end table and standing. I didn’t approach him. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself or why I had risen from my seat in the first place.

“Hi,”

he said, closing the door. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t get here sooner.”

His tone was harried but kind. “I have to tell you what happened at work today. Sit.”

He motioned to the spot on the couch I’d just vacated.

“Okay . . . ,”

I said tentatively, lowering myself down again. He was acting like we were normal, like we weren’t in the middle of falling apart, like I shouldn’t feel as utterly wrecked as I did.

Instead of joining me on the couch, he sat on the large wooden coffee table across from me. There wasn’t much space between the table and the sofa, and his legs ended up flush against mine.

“So you know how I’ve been underwater on the Wagner deal?”

We were at eye level with each other.

I nodded, even though I had only the vaguest sense of that deal.

“Well, I finally came up for air for thirty seconds today, and of course Arjun immediately asked me to be another set of eyes on some reports for him.”

Vance often joked about how Arjun, arguably the smartest person on their floor at work, was constantly asking for “a quickie second opinion.”

Even though no one was more likely to understand the complex business or accounting issues at play than Arjun himself.

“Yeah,”

I said, looking down at where our knees touched and wondering where this was going.

“They’re doing due diligence on some matters related to DeMarke.”

My eyes shot back up to his.

“He had financial statements,”

Vance continued, “showing earnings at the different facilities they manage.”

He took a breath. “DeMarke manages twenty-one facilities, but one number was out of sync with the others. The profit margin at Hydeford is 40 percent higher than all the other facilities DeMarke manages.”

“Wait.”

I sat up straighter. “Hydeford is their most profitable facility?”

Vance nodded, almost frantically.

“I knew it!”

I was suddenly on my feet again. “It’s the insurance payments! Why else would one detention center be getting so much more money than all the rest? The other facilities DeMarke runs have just as many inmates or more. So why would this one place have such a different economic outcome? They’re not just butchering people over there—they’re making a massive profit off it.”

“Jessa, I’m so sorry. I can’t believe I doubted you,”

he said, reaching for my arm and pulling me back into my seat. “I don’t know why I was so stubborn, why I kept insisting you had to be wrong. Maybe I’m just not used to seeing you charge ahead without needing my input.”

He swallowed audibly, and I watched his Adam’s apple bob in his neck. “But I should have listened, Jess. You always knew.”

His hand landed on my leg, and the warmth of it seemed to spread all over my body. I allowed myself one brief moment to sink into a wave of relief at his about-face. Maybe things could still work out for us and I could be finished sleeping alone. But then my mind returned to the case. I had no time to linger on my feelings.

“I have to get on this, like, yesterday!”

I turned back toward my laptop.

“Wait, Jess, just wait.”

He reached for my arm to slow me down. “This could get me fired. You can’t know what I just told you. You have to find the information some other way, not from me.”

Right. I had put him in a difficult position at work after all.

“I get it. It’s fine. There must be other ways to find this information. A lot of it is probably publicly available, and whatever’s not, I should be able to access through discovery.”

“And you won’t tell anyone you heard it from me?”

He could have made a dig then about how practiced I was at keeping secrets. I was relieved he didn’t.

“No, of course not,”

I assured him. “But wait.”

My mind was running on overdrive, new thoughts bombarding me. “Do you think this means everything is coming from the top at DeMarke? That it’s not just some underground scheme at Hydeford? It’s starting to look like company policy, unofficially sanctioned.”

I felt faint at the very notion.

“Well, DeMarke is headquartered in Atlanta,”

Vance said. “If it were company-sanctioned, it wouldn’t make sense that among so many detention centers, only one would be engaging in fraud.”

“It’s not just coming from the doctor though,”

I said. “Now we know that at least.”

“Right,”

he said, glancing down at my laptop as if he wanted to start doing more research, together.

“I’ve looked into how these facilities are structured,”

I said, thinking back to all the information I’d been able to find online. “They have a local company for on-site management. There’s a facility manager, and his compensation is tied to the profitability of the center. The better the center does, the more the manager gets paid. The sterilizations may not be company-sanctioned, but they definitely appear to be facility-sanctioned. Encouraged even. So this isn’t just about controlling these women’s bodies,”

I said, still mentally parsing through the information. “It’s also insurance fraud.”

“It backs up everything you’ve been saying,”

Vance said, squeezing my hand. He was suddenly so very present for me. “They’re preying on people, doing some sort of eugenics or whatever you want to call it. And then they’re profiting from it to boot. The math proves it,”

he said again, his voice thick with admiration. He looked at me with a light in his eyes I hadn’t seen in weeks, and I wanted to bask in it.

I grinned back at him, so relieved to have finally convinced him of what I’d known all along. I allowed myself another moment to absorb that Vance finally believed me, believed in me. He had seen hard evidence, which had restored his confidence in me. But then I felt the familiar clench of annoyance creeping back into my chest as I wished he hadn’t needed outside evidence—that he’d simply believed in me from the start.

I couldn’t think about that now though, because I finally understood the true enormity of what I’d uncovered at Hydeford. Vance had been right about one thing all along—I’d bitten off way more than I could chew on my own.

“Vance.”

I let myself collapse back against the couch. “With all these new possible defendants, this is too big a job for one person. It’s too big a job for two people or five people.”

“Let me help you,”

he said. “I’ve stood in your way long enough. Let me help clear the path.”

Suddenly he was the Vance I’d been hoping for ever since my first trip to Hydeford. Of course I wanted his help. Needed his help. But it wouldn’t be enough.

“But what about us? You left me.”

Vance released a long breath.

“I didn’t really leave you,”

he said. “Let’s not call it that. I just needed some time. I was angry. I mean, you did keep a huge secret about your identity from me. Even if you’d only known the truth for a few weeks, you still hid it.”

I didn’t interrupt to tell him that by saying the secret was tied up with my identity, he’d just validated my deepest worries: that he wouldn’t be able to separate me from my ancestral lineage.

“I mean, it’s not surprising that I would need a minute to process, right?”

he continued, at least having the decency to offer an abashed smile. “Here I thought I’d married a straight arrow. Always coloring inside the lines, not breaking the rules, never straying from a certain narrow path. And then it turns out you have this nefarious family history that’s inspired you to go rogue, running into the craziest legal scenario you’ve ever dealt with, headfirst and all alone.”

It was true. I had always been a rule follower, white-knuckling my way through life, single-mindedly pursuing my limited list of life goals. But the way I’d been living of late, trying to stand up for what was right instead of focusing on some grand master plan, felt so much better.

“You’re my wife,”

Vance said, knocking his leg into mine in an affectionate gesture. “You’re carrying my child. And I love you. We’re going to be our own little family soon.”

I felt the tears that had been pooling in my eyes spill over at his words.

“Hey,”

he said, moving next to me on the sofa. “Come here.”

He wrapped his arms around me, and I relaxed into his hold. We stayed like that, clinging to each other. As I took comfort in our closeness, an image of Dustin flashed into my mind, unbidden. I pushed it away, unwilling to consider what it might mean.

After a while, I pulled back, wiping the sleeve of my hoodie against my cheek.

“Thank you for bringing this information to me, for trusting me with it and finally believing me,”

I said, my voice wet. “But, Vance, I can’t take myself off the case.”

“Well, yeah, no. You can’t.”

Now he was all matter-of-fact, like he’d never suggested otherwise. “I’ve been trying to think of a way for you to handle it. There has to be something in between working too hard and not at all. Right?”

It seemed he had more to say, but I held up my hand. I didn’t need him making a plan of action for me yet again. Whatever he was about to say would only fuel the resentment I was still feeling for the way he’d abandoned me, physically and emotionally. Besides, I had already hatched an idea on my own. Something I’d begun contemplating after my run-in with the cop. And now I knew what I would do.

“Vance,”

I said, the word an instruction for him to stop talking. “I’ve got this. I know what I’m going to do.”

“You do?”

I tried not to be offended by the surprise on my husband’s face, and instead of laying into him for being condescending, I said, “I know this case should have a huge team of people working on it. I mean, we should be pushing for a congressional investigation and bringing down every last person and agency who is complicit in this situation.”

Vance nodded in agreement.

“We need people to help. And I know who to ask. I’m starting with Will Carbone.”

“Who?”

Will Carbone was my former law professor. He ran a clinic at NYU, but I’d only taken his course on evidence. The clinics allowed students to help with pro bono cases to gain experience while litigants benefited from free legal services. Many law schools had similar programs, and now I was sorry I hadn’t participated in the one at my school. Professor Carbone ran the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic along with a partner professor whose name I couldn’t recall. They focused on social justice issues in protecting newly arrived or detained immigrants. It could be a perfect fit. What’s more, if I remembered correctly, the clinic often partnered with outside community-based organizations that provided all kinds of pro bono legal services. Now that I had settled on this idea, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t reached out to them sooner. And NYU was hardly the only school with that kind of clinic. I could check in with Columbia, Cardozo, Fordham, and so many others. An entire team of legal partners was materializing in my mind’s eye, growing by the second.

After I explained all of this to Vance, he reached forward and hugged me.

“I knew you’d find the right support in the end.”

He said it with relief, like it was what he’d been waiting for all along.

What I didn’t say in response was that I wasn’t doing this to lighten my own workload. I’d still be working my ass off because of the enormity, and the importance, of the case.

As he pulled back from the embrace, his expression told me he wanted everything to go back to normal between us. I wanted that too. I took in the soft light of his Coca-Cola eyes and the warmth on his face, and I tried to imagine picking up where we’d left off. A movie reel played in my mind as I pictured us moving forward together again—eating takeout on the sofa while we binged new shows, spending weekends with family, or doing our work side by side like before. And of course, now, becoming parents together. Yet the images in my mind left me feeling anxious and empty somehow, and I worried that the life I was imagining was simply no longer possible.