Protect & Serve(16)

“No more fancy title, no more office?” I finished for him. “You would’ve had nothing except for your things, your fancy home, your garage full of expensive cars, and the hundreds of millions of dollars you probably have stashed away in the Cayman Islands. Wasn’t that enough? You’re telling me you secured a job title on the backs of those young women and girls.”

“I didn’t know,” he insisted.

“Because you didn’t want to know!” I replied, gripping the edge of the table so hard my knuckles turned white. I could feel the smoke of anger swirling in my lungs, tightening my chest as it rose into my throat and spilled out of my mouth. “You just wanted the money! You wanted the power! If you’d bothered to look, you would’ve seen their faces. But you couldn’t have that, could you? You couldn’t have that kind of guilt on your head!”

Nathan sat back, folding his arms and looking away from me. “You’re wrong. I never, not for one second, considered there might be people in that container. Look, my family, my whole company has a history of looking the other way. My father didn’t build a huge mansion in Miami on the back of Chinese imports—he built the foundation of this company on cocaine smuggling. Sure, he went ‘legit’ by the Nineties, but that was on paper, Sandra. There were people putting pressure on me to keep quiet and maintain business as usual. Maybe I wanted to make everything legal, but it was easier to let other people deal with the dirty parts of the business. I chose to look the other way and play stupid. That’s on me.”

“We’re talking about lives here, Nathan,” I whispered. “Not drugs. Not guns. People.”

“If I had known… I would have done the right thing. That’s why I came to the police. Because when I heard what he’d been doing… When I heard about that container they shoved off into the ocean… I couldn’t help but wonder if I’d had something to do with it. If I had, and I let that asshole walk free, I couldn’t have lived with myself.”

I shook my head, and he blinked back tears. “Christ, Sandra… Haven’t you ever made a mistake in your life? One that you could’ve avoided if only you hadn’t looked the other way?”

The question hit me like a kick to the chest. My words dried up in my throat and I looked away from him, staring at the dingy table and my fingernails pressing into it. I closed my eyes, letting the whirlwind inside me die down.

Haven’t you ever made a mistake?

“Yeah,” I said finally, nearly choking on the word. “A long time ago, before I knew better. Before I… became a cop. I didn’t see what was happening around me because I didn’t want to. I wanted to believe in a pretty little lie, and it cost my sister her life.” My stomach turned. “I guess that makes me just as bad as you.”

Nathan’s expression softened. “What happened?”

It wasn’t a story I told often—or ever, if I could avoid it. But there was no backing out of this conversation now, not with the tidal wave of my shame brimming in my eyes and on my lips. I had to tell him.

“I got emancipated when I was seventeen,” I said at last, dropping my hands into my lap to keep from breaking my nails on the wooden table. “I took custody of my sister, Jenny. Our mother was a junkie, in and out of prison all the time, and after our aunt died… Well, it was just the two of us. I thought I had my shit together. I thought that I was the best thing for her. I thought that she’d see me working hard and playing by the rules and she’d want that for herself, too. I refused to believe that the fifteen years she’d spent watching our mom shoot up and smoke meth would tempt her to do the same thing. She’s a good girl, I told myself. She’d never do that shit.”

Nathan had put his fork down, just listening intently.

“So when Jenny started going to parties and not coming back for a few days, I told myself she was just troubled and going through some hard times. When I saw track marks in her arm, I told myself that there had to be some other kind of explanation, though I never even bothered to come up with one. When she lost so much weight that she was sometimes too weak to walk, I tried to ignore it all.”

“That’s not your fault,” Nathan offered, but I continued despite his petty attempt to stem the flow of words.

“And when she ODed in her room while I was cooking dinner? You’re trying to tell me that wasn’t my fault? That was when I couldn’t lie to myself anymore. That was when I finally had to look at her and see what she really was, what she had been for damn near a year. I finally had to see her bruises, the punctures in her arm and between her toes, the way her body had so obviously been used by the men supplying her with the shit that took her life. But by then it was too late, wasn’t it? I’d already put her in the ground with all the lies I told myself. I may as well have been holding the needle.”