For a brief moment, Nita wondered if Fabricio had sold her because she’d told him her father was Chilean and Fabricio was Argentinian. The relationship between the two countries had been strained for a long time. It got worse in the eighties, after the Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom, when Chile was the only South American country to side with Britain.
But the more she thought about it, the more unbelievable it sounded. Selling a person on the black market because of events in a war that happened before they were born, especially after that person had saved him, was just absurd.
Not that his reasoning mattered. There was no excuse that could justify what he’d done.
A knock interrupted her musings.
Nita hurriedly tucked the flower away and opened the door.
Agent Quispe stood in the entranceway, her smile friendly and professional. “Nita, I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.”
Nita shook her head. “No.”
“Good. I just wanted to let you know that your new passport came.” Quispe held it out to her. “We’re booked on a flight to Toronto in two days. We can’t fly you straight to the US for legal reasons, so you’ll go through some processing in Canada, and then we can fly you home.”
Nita swallowed and nodded, even though her heart sank. After Toronto processing, she was supposed to go home, to that suburban house in Chicago. The house she hadn’t seen since she left when she was twelve, dragged around the world by her mother, hunting unnaturals to sell.
To her father, who she hadn’t seen in person since she was twelve.
She’d imagined a grand reunion, running into his arms. If she closed her eyes, she could still feel the warmth of his embrace, the way he’d stroke her hair, the gentle timbre of his voice.
But her father wasn’t there anymore. There would be no tearful reunion, no warm hug, no sinking into his arms and letting herself believe that somehow, someday, everything would be okay.
Her father was dead.
Her eyes began to water at the thought, and she shoved the rising tide of emotion away ruthlessly. Now was not the time.
Quispe seemed to realize what was happening. As she should, she’d been the one to tell Nita about her father’s murder a few days ago. And to show her the picture of her father’s murderer, a vampire on the hunt for her mother.
Quispe’s eyes softened. “Have you contacted any other family members yet?”
Nita shook her head. “I’ll email some people. I’ll let you know more tomorrow.”
Quispe hesitated a moment. “I’m sorry about your father.”
Nita’s face almost cracked, everything leaking out and onto the floor, the grief like a demon trapped in her skin, just waiting for Nita to lose her strength so it could break free and leave only tatters of her skin shell behind.
She shrugged and looked away, trying to hide her face from Quispe. “It’s fine.”
“If you want to talk—”
“I don’t.”
There was a short pause, and Quispe sighed. “All right. If you need anything else, let me know.”
“I will.”
Nita slowly closed the door, hesitant at first, in case Quispe had something else to say, then quickly when she realized it really was the end of the conversation and slowly closing the door looked super awkward.
Nita ended up slamming the door in the INHUP agent’s face, which was, of course, more awkward.
Her body shook slightly, and she leaned against the door. She swallowed and looked down at the stiff material of her American passport. She thumbed through the pages, each covered in washed-out images of national monuments. She flipped to the picture page, and looked down at her photo, taken by INHUP. Her frizzy brown curls were pulled back, and their slight orange tint was even more pronounced in the passport material’s shine. The freckles across her nose and cheeks looked like blood spatter in the harsh light, and her brown skin looked grayish with exhaustion. She stared into the camera with too-intense eyes, like she was challenging the photographer.
Her first passport she didn’t remember, but her second she’d gotten when she was ten. Her father took her to get the pictures, and he’d made funny faces at her from behind the photographer that made her laugh and ruined every take. When the photographer turned around, her father stood there, stoic and stern, one eyebrow raised as though to ask the photographer if there was a problem.
It had taken nearly half an hour to get a decent shot, and afterward they’d gone for ice cream. She’d gotten a waffle cone with sprinkles around the edge, and sat there giggling at her father’s ice cream mustache as he did impersonations of the teachers in school she didn’t like.
Grief swamped Nita, crashing through her like a tidal wave, all the stronger for those few moments she’d managed to hold it off while Quispe was there. It smashed against her ribs, rattling them, before retreating and pooling in her empty chest cavity, like a lake of tears waiting to be shed.
Her father was dead.
No more goofy faces. No more ice cream.
Nita leaned against the wall, then slowly slid down to the floor, fingers clenched around her new passport, her eyes tightly closed, trying to stop the tears before they started. Because once they started, they took ages to stop.
Nita had been walking down the hall yesterday and seen someone with the same pair of glasses as her father. That had been enough to set her off, crying into flower bushes and hiding in her room for the rest of the afternoon.
Part of her just wanted the pain to go away. She wanted to stop feeling awful all the time. She wanted to skip to the part where she was over it, where the grief was nothing but a distant memory.
Even as she thought that, it felt disloyal to her father. He deserved to be cried over. He was the only good person in her life, he had always been her friend and ally when her mother took things too far. How dare she try to avoid thinking about him to avoid pain?
She didn’t know if it was selfish to not want to face the pain, or if it was like an open wound, where she had to wait for it to scab over before she could poke at it without making it bleed again.
Nita curled on the floor for a few minutes, trying to get control of her tears. When she finally rose, she went into the bathroom and blew her nose. She splashed her face with cold water and let out a short huff of breath.
Her reflection stared back at her, haunted and angry. She tightened her jaw until her reflection didn’t look sad anymore, just determined.
She nodded to herself. She was in control.
She flopped onto her bed and closed her eyes. The tears had given her a pounding headache, and all she wanted to do was fall asleep and forget for a while.
Reluctantly, she opened her eyes and pulled out her phone. Quispe had reminded her of the one thing she had to do before bed.
Quispe had only returned Nita’s phone right before they met Fabricio. Nita hadn’t had a chance to see if it still worked after taking a dunk in the Amazon River. Soaking it in rice was supposed to fix it, but who knew.
She ran her finger over the screen, thinking of her captor, Reyes, the first owner of this phone. Nita could still see her cold eyes. How she’d worn the same expression talking about money that she’d worn ordering people tortured. Blank. Empty.
Nita shivered and pushed the image from her mind. Reyes was dead. Nita had killed her. And that was one death she’d never regret.