Chapter 27
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
ANDI
Luke drives.
Three hours north on a Tuesday in early December, the Tennessee hills are now bare, with all leaves fallen and the sky reflecting a season that has fully settled in.
I hold coffee in a travel mug, the window slightly open, embodying a person who has been steadily moving toward a goal and now feels it within reach.
We don’t talk much. That’s one of the things this year gave us—the ability to be in the same space without filling it. He drives while I watch the hills, and somewhere in the middle of it, he reaches across and rests his hand on mine on the center console, leaving it there.
We arrive at eleven.
Bill’s temporary office in Nashville is a conference room he borrowed from a colleague for the day.
Daniel is already there when we walk in.
He stands when he sees us, the precise movement of someone who has been sitting with something for a long time and is relieved to be in the same room as the people it belongs to.
We shake hands. It feels insufficient. I think we both know that.
Delia comes in five minutes later with a woman I don’t recognize—introduced as her attorney, someone Daniel found, completely outside any network Evelyn ever touched.
Delia looks better than Luke described her when she stood in the parking lot two weeks ago.
She’s still fine-boned, still careful, but something has settled on her face that wasn’t there when she walked out of the facility.
She sits across from me. She sets the journal on the table between us. It’s older than I expected—the leather worn at the corners, the cover creased from years of handling. A rubber band holds it closed. She doesn’t open it. She just sets it there.
“Twenty years,” she says. “I started it before I understood what I was documenting. I kept it because I understood and couldn’t stop.
” She looks at the journal. “Jackson knew I kept it. He didn’t know what was in it.
He thought it was personal.” She doesn’t take her hand off the cover. “Some of it is.”
“You don’t have to give this to me,” I say.
“I know.” She meets my eyes. “I want to.” She looks at the journal again.
“I heard what happened. What Evelyn did to you at fifteen. What she did to your parents. What she’s been doing since then.
” She’s quiet for a moment. “I should have said something. Years ago. I had enough—I had more than enough to make it stop.” She looks at her hands. “I was afraid.”
The room is very still.
“You were in a system that taught you what happens when you speak,” I say.
“You were married to a man who was part of the machine. You were surrounded by people who were paid to manage exactly this kind of situation.” I hold her eyes.
“Fear wasn’t weakness. It was the accurate assessment of a woman who understood her situation. ”
She looks at me for a long moment.
“Daniel told me what you said to a girl at your center,” she says. “About reporting something at fifteen and being told you were unstable.”
“Yes.”
“You went anyway,” she says. “Even after that. You kept going.”
“Eventually,” I say. “It took a while.”
“But you went.” She pushes the journal across the table toward me. “If she’s still standing,” she says. Not finishing the sentence. Not needing to.
I put my hand on the journal, but I don’t pick it up yet.
“You came to see me,” I say. “When I was in the facility. I was fifteen.”
She goes very still.
“You told me it was your idea. That Jackson wanted me, but you convinced him the younger ones would be easier to control.” I hold her gaze. “A girl named Maria was hurt at nine because of that decision.”
The room is completely quiet.
“I know,” she says. Not defending it. Not explaining it. Just—knowing it. The way she has known it for fourteen years.
“I needed to say it,” I say. “Before I took this.”
“I know that too,” she says.
I pick up the journal.
“I can stand up,” she finishes quietly.
I look at her. At the woman who married a senator, watched his operation run for twenty years, and wrote it all down in a leather journal while afraid, the way people are afraid when the fear is the correct response to the actual situation.
She kept writing.
“Thank you,” I say.
She nods once, then looks at Daniel. Something passes between them—an unspoken understanding between two people who have been through something together and don’t need to narrate it.
“The federal investigators want the journal,” Bill says from his end of the table. “The original goes to them. But I’ve arranged for a full copy—every page—to be made before we turn it over.”
“I know,” I say. “That’s not what it’s for.”
Everyone looks at me.
“The copy,” I say. “I’m going to write a book.”
The room is quiet.
“Not a legal document. Not testimony. A book.” I look at the journal under my hand. “Everything that happened. What the machine does, who it does it to, and how it survives. The people it moved through.” I look at Delia. “With permission.”
She considers this.
“Will you use my name?” she says.
“Only if you want me to.”
“Will you use yours?”
“Yes,” I say. “As loud as I want.”
Something in her face—not quite a smile, but the precursor to one. “Then use mine too.”
The drive home is different from the drive up.
Not in any way I can point to. Luke still drives. I still drink coffee. The hills are still bare.
But something has shifted—the way it does when something you’ve been under for a long time finally lifts. Not finished, exactly. The book isn’t written. The federal case will take years. The machine is still moving, just in smaller, quieter ways.
But the part we were supposed to do is done.
I hold the copy of the journal in my lap.
“She said if you’re still standing, she can stand up,” Luke says.
“Yes.”
“You’ve been standing for a long time.”
I look at the hills going past.
“So has she,” I say. “She just did it in a different room.”
He drives.
I open the copy of the journal to the first page.
Deja finds me at the center two days later.
Not in my office—at the homework table, where she usually is, where she’s been coming every day for eight months now. I’m passing through when she looks up.
“Can I talk to you?” she says.
I sit across from her.
She closes her textbook. She’s been thinking about what she wants to say. I can tell from her unusual stillness, the way she’s holding herself together to deliver something she’s worked out in advance.
“I know what’s happening,” she says. “With the investigation. The federal case. The placement agencies.” She holds my gaze. “I know because I lived it. I have names. I have descriptions. I have—” She stops. “I remember specific things. The kind of things that would matter in a federal case.”
I look at her. Fifteen years old. In the system since she was eight. Found this door herself four months before the machine identified her.
“You want to testify,” I say.
“You went,” she says. “To the legislative committee. You stood up and told what happened to you.” She looks at the table. “I want to go too.”
I think about the legislative committee, the prepared remarks, the chair putting her phone down at the two-minute mark, and the cost of it.
“It’s hard,” I say. “Not the testifying. The before and the after. People will know your name. People will know your history.”
“People already know,” she says. “The network already knows who I am. My file was on Mrs. Alvarez’s desk.” She meets my gaze. “I’d rather they know because I stood up than because they pulled a record.”
I hold her gaze for a long moment.
She’s fifteen. She’s had this since she was eight. She found this door herself because she needed somewhere to go, and she kept coming back because she decided it was safe.
She’s asking me if it’s safe to do this.
“I’ll talk to Bill,” I say. “And your caseworker. And we’ll find you the best attorney available who does this kind of work.
And we won’t move until you’ve had time to think about it—really think, not just the first feeling.
” I hold her gaze. “This is your decision. Not mine, not Bill’s, not anyone else’s. Yours.”
She nods. The nod of someone who has never been told that before and is deciding whether to believe it.
“Okay,” she says.
“Okay,” I say.
She opens her textbook.
I sit with her at the homework table for a while—not doing anything specific, just being present. The afternoon program runs around us, the building does what it does, and the front door still faces the street.
After a while she says, without looking up from her work: “Andi?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you for building this place.”
I look at her bent head. At the textbook. At the homework she’s doing in a building she found herself in because she needed somewhere to go.
“Thank you for finding it,” I say.
“Andi?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“Do you think Same and Linda meant it when they said they wanted to adopt me too?” Deja looks down at the homework table, removing an invisible mark from the surface with her finger. “Do they really want to be my family?”
“Yes, Deja, they mean exactly what they say. They love you. Is that what you want?”
“I think so.”
That’s as close to a “yes” to my questions as I’ll get from Deja.
But it’s enough for now.