The Crush (The Crush Series Book 1)

The Lie

The news played on every channel. Breaking through a steady stream of Christmas advertisements on December 2, 1993, to announce the end of a story that some may have forgotten the US was still telling.

My friends must have thought I was crazy, sitting in my room and watching broadcast after broadcast. The same news every time with the same take. The same pictures of a man that had made destroying lives into a billion-dollar business. That we had spent sixteen months trying to find before he’d finally met his fate running barefoot on a roof in Medellín.

But I wasn’t looking for Pablo Escobar.

“I don’t know,” my mother had said when I’d talked to her later that night, the sound of her own TV audible in the background. “I saw Tadeo earlier, and…he seemed to think Danny still wasn’t coming home.” She’d sighed, sounding sad. “I don’t know, mija.”

No one ever seemed to. No one ever seemed to know exactly where he was or when he might finally come back, just as we hadn’t known he was going at all until the morning it happened. Until he’d shown up to give my mother a tight hug, my father and my brothers a firm handshake, and me…a gentle pat on the arm. See ya, kid.

I hadn’t bothered to ask my mother many questions then, just like I hadn’t bothered to ask the day Escobar was killed. Even if it might have made me feel better to hear her tell me that everything would be all right. Even if I never liked to be told things that I already believed were lies.

Why then was I always telling so many?