I still had to do my job, though. And if my team needed me to tease out whether she was telling the truth, I would. No matter our history.
2
KASSIDY
Like I’d done hundreds of times in the past few months, I pulled the obituaries out of my wallet and unfolded them, smoothing the wrinkles out as much as I could. The two pieces of paper were crinkled and worn, but so far, the words and photographs were still visible. I laid them side by side on my desk and studied the names: Bianca Gonzales and Catalina Gonzales. They had been sisters, and two of my best childhood friends. Over the years since I’d lost touch with them, I’d tried to find them again, but now it was too late. They were dead.
I was born to a Finnish mother and an American father, the second of two girls, and for a few years, we were a happy family. When I was seven, though, my father decided that his ambitions were more important than his family. He left us in Finland, returning to America and opening his own advertising business in Los Angeles. After that, my older sister and I spent every summer with our father in LA. My sister was outgoing and beautiful, and as soon as we showed up at the beginning of every summer, she began receiving countless invitations for playdates and sleepovers, meaning she spent most of her time with other people. I’d always been quieter, though, so I spent most of my summers stuck inside my father’s enormous house.
My father had several staff members who lived on his property, and who he expected to entertain me when he was busy, which was most of the time. My nanny, Guadalupe, and my father’s gardener, Bruno, were my favorites, and they were also Bianca and Catalina’s parents. They treated me like part of their family, and they were the only part of America that I missed when I left at the end of every summer.
It wasn’t until years later that I saw the reality that Guadalupe, Bruno, and their daughters were living. My father had always forbidden me from going into the basement where the staff lived, and up until then, I had obeyed him. As a precocious twelve-year-old, though, I felt that rules didn’t apply to me, and I snuck down there one morning, looking for my friends. I was shocked at the tiny, dirty, unfinished “apartment” they were squeezed into, and I hated that they had to ration their hot water and electricity when my father and I had so many amenities just a floor above them. They also had very few belongings, and barely any food, and it was clear that my father wasn’t providing them with any type of medical care. They were treated like slaves, and the realization horrified me.
I immediately confronted my father about how his staff was living, but trying to demand better living conditions for them backfired. He told me that all of his staff was being treated extremely well in his home, compared to how they would be living if they’d stayed in their home country of Colombia. He also told me that the Gonzales family had crossed over the border illegally, and that he could have them deported back to Colombia at any moment. After that conversation, anytime I brought up his staff’s living conditions, he threatened to have them deported immediately. He’d described Colombia as a hopeless, lawless, dangerous country, so I was afraid to risk their deportation, even to give them a chance at freedom.
As I got older, I learned that what my father was doing was called human trafficking, and by the time I was 18 years old, I had no interest in returning to my father’s home ever again. Even while staying away, though, I tried time and again to check on Bianca, Catalina, and their parents, but it was difficult. I also tried to find a way to help them without getting them deported. I had no clear way to accomplish that, either, but I kept researching, kept looking for a way to help them without putting them at risk.
It wasn’t until my father passed away a few months ago, and I found myself returning to his home and going through his things, that I learned the devastating truth. Inside stacks of spiral-bound accounting notebooks in his office, everything he’d done was documented clear as day, in horrifying detail. Learning about his crimes still haunts me months later.
My father had been an avid human trafficker. He didn't limit himself to just his personal staff he kept in the basement. Over the years he lived in LA, he sold, bought, and traded other humans—hundreds, maybe thousands of them—into forced labor and sexual slavery. When I turned 18 and stopped visiting him, he’d started to keep female slaves at his home, for his own use, and it seemed like he’d added more and more women to his “collection” over the years. It wasn’t until he was diagnosed with terminal cancer a year ago that he sold all of those poor women, along with the workers who ran his household.
His notebooks also held the secret to what happened to my beloved Gonzales family. Guadalupe and Bruno had died years ago, from the flu. I had a feeling that they could’ve lived much longer if they’d received medical care, if my father hadn’t been a psychopath. Their fate was nothing compared to Catalina’s and Bianca’s, though. Once my friends were old enough, my father added them to his stable of women, using them himself and whoring them out to his guests. Just like the others, he sold them once he learned about his cancer.
As soon as I discovered what happened to them, I started following the money trail my father left, trying to track down their buyer. The search ended with a dead end, though. Instead of finding out where they were, I found their obituaries, as well as news articles and social media posts mentioning them. Only a couple of weeks after my father died, and mere days before I’d begun going through his things, my friends had died. Bianca had been stabbed to death by one of her Johns, and Catalina had overdosed a few days later.
The guilt, and the unfairness of it all, hits me every single day, fresh pain washing over me each time I remember. My friends had been sweet, and smart, and would’ve given the clothes off their backs to anyone who needed them. They could’ve done so much with their lives if they’d been given the same chances as me. Why did I deserve to thrive and to follow my dreams, when my friends were being abused in horrific ways? Why didn’t I do more to help them, to stop my father, so that they didn’t end up addicted to drugs and murdered?
I couldn’t save my friends, but I was dedicating myself to saving others in trafficking situations, no matter what.
I gave myself a few more moments to study Bianca and Catalina’s obituaries, to commit their faces to my memory. I never wanted to forget them, or what they’d gone through because of me. When I was satisfied, I carefully folded the papers again, returning them to my wallet.
I returned to the report I’d been working on, but like normal since my father’s death, I struggled to focus, my mind continually drifting to thoughts of faceless trafficking victims and the horrors they were going through. I knew that my work was suffering—my supervisor had commented on it, after all— but I just couldn’t muster up any enthusiasm for helping businesses make more money when there were so many people out there who needed to be rescued.
3
EVAN
I arrived at the Finnish embassy unannounced, and I had to wait in the lobby for a few minutes while they paged Kassidy. As I looked around, I admired the building, with its large windows, its curving wooden staircases, and its glass walkway next to a thick growth of trees. I remembered reading that it was built to be environmentally friendly and high tech, which I was impressed with. It almost felt like a treehouse in the middle of Washington, D.C.