THREE
For a long time, I didn’t tell anyone what happened—he told me no one would believe me. I knew he was right. Nobody would trust a little girl who said her father and her brother were molesting her. They’d say I was making it up. And I wasn’t.
—DIONNA JEFFREYS
What I’d seen at the women’s jail lingered within me for days afterward. I couldn’t still the voice of the woman who’d whispered how bad things actually were at the facility. Her words, coupled with what I’d witnessed, had put me in a state of both intellectual and emotional dislocation. In the truest sense of the cliché, I was in unfamiliar territory. When I’d visited women in jail or prison before, I was always accompanied by an attorney and our meetings were held in interview rooms. We’d talked about their cases and how I might help. I only thought briefly what each woman confronted after I left; I was focused on their case, thinking about their judge and what I’d say as an expert witness. But up until the philanthropy field trip, I’d never actually seen the conditions incarcerated women were forced to endure.
My ignorance and inexperience were a microcosm of how much I didn’t know about women and the criminal justice system. Up until this point, my work had focused on boys and men and the overwhelming problem of gang violence. I’d long wanted to understand why boys as young as ten or eleven years old had been driven to join gangs and risk spending their lives in prison, along with enduring the trauma of killing and the threat of being killed. It was if they had no agency, only despair—their violent fates were predetermined. As I learned about the twists and turns of their lives, I wanted to find out how any of these same boys and the men they became ultimately left gang life. I needed to understand how a small and steadily growing group of men had survived incarceration, returning to the communities they’d terrorized, struggling to reconnect with the children they’d been separated from, all while creating lives of purpose and meaning.
It wasn’t that I’d completely ignored women as I navigated gang culture. In reality, I had grown close to several women who associated with gangs because of their families, the fathers of their children, and just their basic economic need. This had all occurred because, with the blessing and approval of G—Father Greg Boyle—I had the extraordinary experience of being embedded at Homeboy Industries for almost four years. I sat in G’s office, “a fly on the wall,” as he labeled me, watching how he applied his overarching philosophy of kinship in real time. I witnessed both the hard-won successes and the struggles the leadership staff faced trying to keep Homeboy running as they dealt with ongoing financial pressures. Alongside this work, I spent weeks sitting in the Homegirl Café, charting the lives of the women who worked there—the “waitresses with attitude,” as G called them—recording their histories and learning about their children, boyfriends, families.
At the time, Homegirl had an exclusively female staff, and its approach combining employment and wraparound services had proved highly successful. Because of the ongoing struggle for more funding, its reach was confined to business hours. After work, an ad hoc support system existed among the women there, but it was not supported financially. Additionally, Homegirl could not meet one of the most critical needs formerly incarcerated women confronted: housing. This lack of housing was part of a vicious cycle trapping women into dependence on men, prostitution, substance misuse, drug dealing, and other criminal activity. There were “halfway houses” scattered throughout Los Angeles County where women could live once they exited prison. Yet, all too often, these so-called houses were set up to control, not rehabilitate, and offered little to no reentry services, leading to recidivism and more pain.
There were some reentry organizations that tried to help women as well as men dealing with life after incarceration. The problem was that, however well-intentioned, the programs that included women pretty much followed a “one size fits all” model—and the size was usually men’s, extra-large. Most significantly, in retrofitting men’s programs to include women, the role of children was rarely considered—and even when children were mentioned, they were more of an afterthought. Few reentry programs were specifically designed for women and their families. Homegirl struggled to respond to this problem, but it wasn’t enough. It couldn’t help all the women who’d finished serving their time, who were trying to reenter their families and their lives.
Now, to add to what I’d learned at the Homegirl Café, the trip on the bus had raised a new series of questions: What had these women endured? And how had they ended up entangled in the criminal justice system? Just as I’d once asked why men became deeply attached to gangs, I now needed to understand how women became involved with gangs and criminal activity. And more than anything, I wanted to grasp what happened to women after incarceration: How did they remake their lives? Or were they even able to remake their lives? The visit to the jail had only highlighted how much I didn’t know.
I wasn’t alone in my ignorance. While Orange Is the New Black was “flavor of the month” on HBO for a while, gaining critical acclaim and millions of viewers, the actual lived experiences of women who’d been incarcerated still received little attention from practitioners and policymakers. I didn’t think that a one-day visit by philanthropists to a detention facility was going to change that. There might be a lot of handwringing and a series of declarations, but what exactly was going to happen to make the lives of these women any better? The only response to the increasing numbers of detained and incarcerated women was that the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors was moving toward construction of a new county jail specifically for women, to the tune of approximately $1.2 billion to $1.5 billion. The ridiculousness of the cost was eclipsed by the insanity of where the jail was going to be constructed: in the middle of the city of Lancaster, over eighty miles from the neighborhoods of South Los Angeles County, where most women at risk for incarceration and their families lived.
These major policy concerns are crowded out of my attention when I call former homegirl and my unofficially adopted daughter Joanna Carillo, to see what’s going on in her life. She tells me that a mutual acquaintance, Sonya, has been locked up for drug dealing; right now, Joanna’s trying to get enough money together to bail Sonya out. I tell Joanna to come over to UCLA, and I’ll give her $200. My husband goes to the ATM several times a week and silently adds cash to my wallet because he knows of my ongoing efforts to bail out the ocean of need with a bucket. I wonder if there is any hope of Joanna actually getting together the $5,000 that is needed. Uneasily, I shift my attention to the other part of my life, teaching.
In my office on campus, I’m trying to ignore what feels like my own version of multiple personality disorder. This morning, alongside my work partner Karrah Lompa, I’ve been spending time in Watts, meeting with local leaders, interviewing residents, and trying to get people the resources they need. Now, in the afternoon, I’m at UCLA, lecturing to undergraduates about the problems confronted by individuals enmeshed in dysfunctional systems. This is followed by office hours, where students sometimes want to discuss my least favorite part of the job: grades.
Most of these students are extraordinary people who care deeply about inequality and social justice; they make my life a joy. During office hours, I relish talking with them and never want them to leave. But it’s the students in search of their A, who don’t want to talk about learning, who drive me crazy. Today, the students have just received their midterm grades, making office hours an exercise in anger management (mine) until—in the midst of all the complaints about grades and the excuses about why they missed six classes in a row—a student appears who is neither obsequious nor maddening. She is strong, tough, defiant. I’m not sure how to react to her yet I know, in an instant, what thirty-seven years of teaching has equipped me to see. She is special.
Denise Marshall has already emailed me several times asking me questions about the course and social welfare. Still, I don’t recognize her name—maybe because all I know is her email handle, China Girl. I later learn that this was her gang moniker as well. I can see why her name has endured—Denise is a beautiful Black woman with a dark, unblemished complexion and a small compact body, a little over five feet tall. She is dressed strikingly, wearing a scarlet blouse with nails to match. The minute she tells me her full name, I know she has been incarcerated. This isn’t due to any sixth sense; it’s because I serve on the faculty advisory board of a campus organization, the UCLA Underground Scholars Initiative. Founded by Danny Murillo at UC Berkeley, the group is composed of formerly incarcerated students devoted to helping one another navigate the challenges of undergraduate study. In this on-campus organization dominated by men, Denise is one of very few women who participates, consistently and vocally. She’s clear about the depth of her struggles as a formerly incarcerated woman, writing about her experiences in a paper she submitted for my class. But this is the first time we have met in person.
Interacting with me, Denise is full of contradictions. She is warm yet guarded. The phrase she uses almost reflexively is “What do you mean by that?,” delivered with the slightest edge. She’s not going to be easy, and yet I welcome her attitude. I’m wary of students who either seek my approval or approach me with a playlist of a sycophant’s greatest hits—flattery, hyperbole, you name it. Not Denise.
“I want to talk to you about your class,” she tells me. “And I want to talk to you about graduate school.”
“Okay . . . let’s start with the class.”
“I think there’s a lot of fools in there. There are students, they don’t have any idea about what it’s really like out in the world.” She leans in for emphasis, “You’ve got some students saying, ‘There’s discrimination here at UCLA.’ Discrimination! Get the fuck out of here! What type of rock do you live under? You’re so lucky to be here—we’re all so lucky to be here. I know what discrimination feels like—I just couldn’t articulate it. What UCLA has given me is the opportunity to learn. That’s the start of change.”
Denise barely stops to breathe.
“The students and even sometimes the administration—they worry so much about things that don’t matter. I thought I wanted to get a master’s and then a doctorate, but I don’t know; there’s just so much bullshit. I want to go on with school. I want to change my life. I just don’t know if I can put up with all of this. I don’t know if I want to.”
The air is thick with Denise’s hostility. I’ve seen students like her in the past, similarly full of anger and plans, who didn’t follow through on anything they claimed they wanted to do. I calculate the depth of her recovery, her dedication, her ability to succeed at UCLA. It’s my white privilege on parade and I check myself. I also know there’s a deeper story here, but past failures have taught me to just shut the fuck up and allow Denise to tell her own story, at her own pace. Instead of asking about her background, I will wait. That information is for another day. For now, I cut to the future.
“I think you’ve got what it takes to succeed here, to graduate—”
“I know I do.”
“Okay. So you will have to put up with the bullshit to get your degree.”
At this, Denise starts laughing. “Okay.”
“So, what do you want to know about graduate school?” I ask. “I want my MSW. I know I want that.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to help people—my people—the ones no one helps. The girls. The women who’ve been in prison. The men get everything. Why is that? The women need help too.”
“What’s your GPA?”
“A 3.9 since I got to UCLA. I’ve been in the honors program. I know I can do graduate school. Now are you gonna help me?”
“You gotta do what I say—and I will work to help you get in.”
“Okay.”
I wasn’t making an empty promise and I wasn’t going to have to ask any special favors to guarantee her admission to the MSW program. Denise was close to graduating UCLA with a very competitive GPA; the little I knew of her personal history would reinforce her already strong case for admission. But after setting up our next meeting, Denise had a parting shot. “I know you’re trying to tell me I’ve got to understand your world. I don’t know if you can understand my world. Unless you’ve been through it, you don’t understand what it’s like to try making your way in this world after living in that other world. Being here—it’s like landing on the moon.”
Denise and I meet several times in the weeks that follow. Slowly, her edgy wariness diminishes. She trusts me, to a point. She has to. As part of her graduate school application, she’s knee deep in the daunting process of amassing her paperwork, her letters of recommendation, and the most difficult task of all, writing her personal statement. The more we talk, the more I’m convinced she has the makings of a social worker, combining intellectual talent with lived experience. “Lived experience”—how I hate that phrase. Is there such a thing as unlived experience?
I’m thinking about this as I drive to a community meeting being held at Dorsey High School in the aftermath of yet another school shooting. I’m traveling north on Crenshaw Boulevard, which crosscuts the Thirties, a series of residential streets beginning with Thirtieth Street. All around are the signs of slowly emerging urban development and gentrification: townhomes are under various stages of construction, and a new shopping center surrounds USC, a few blocks to the east.
But appearances are deceiving: this is Rollin’ 30s gang territory in the city of Los Angeles. At a stoplight I peek at my phone and see an email from “China Girl,” asking me to read her personal statement. If I believed in the paranormal, I’d swear Denise is psychic—I’m driving through the neighborhood where she grew up. When she came of age, the Rollin’ 30s Crips were already notorious as a violent, multigenerational street gang claiming a membership of around seven hundred, broken into three major cliques. Things haven’t changed. Even now, with its base of operations in South Los Angeles, the gang remains a target for the LAPD. Although tied in name to other Crips sets, this association never stopped the Rollin’ 30s from engaging with their supposed allies in often lethal disputes, some of which raged for days in the surrounding streets during the 1980s and ‘90s. That was Denise’s first exposure to gang violence.
The presence of the Rollin’ 30s didn’t shape Denise’s childhood as much as the violence at home. Over the past few weeks, she’s begun to open up, telling me she was the child of a relationship that was “troubled from the beginning; my father was abusive, and my mother wasn’t strong.” After her parents broke up, her mother married the man Denise still considers her father, explaining, “When I talk about my father, that’s who I am referring to—my stepfather.” The union endured for about ten years, until her stepfather began smoking crack, becoming a victim of the drug epidemic that was laying waste to the Black community in South Los Angeles in the late 1980s and 1990s. This communitywide tragedy came to play a specific role in Denise’s family life—one with lasting impact.
“Around the time he started smoking crack, he just disappeared. Then my father’s family—his mother, his two brothers, and his sister—all came from Alabama to stay with us. Their father had been a child molester. He molested all of his children, including my dad. That kind of trickled down because my uncle Marcus, my dad’s brother, molested me and my sister.”
I’m sad to say her account didn’t surprise me. Based on nationwide data, the National Center for Victims of Crime reports that one in five girls is a victim of childhood sexual abuse. Due to shame, fear, and other factors, this number is most likely low, the incidence of sexual abuse underreported. So many victims of childhood sexual abuse want to forget whatever happened. Sometimes their families insist that they are lying. This conspiracy of silence affects the rest of these children’s lives. And so many simply don’t want to talk about it.
Not Denise. She described this traumatic turn of events matter-of-factly. I worried she was pushing her emotions away—so many women who’d experienced sexual abuse did. But while her story had similarities with the narratives of other women, it came with a slightly different twist.
“Uncle Marcus was a teenager. My sister and me were his first victims. It started when I was six or seven, and it stopped when I was eleven—that’s when I told my mom. She went crazy because her family has a history of molestation. So, when it came out, it was a big ball of shit.” Denise revealed everything to her mother because of “that stupidass commercial that said, ‘If someone touches you in your private places, you need to tell somebody.’
“My mom told my grandmother, who was absolutely devastated. I was a minor and he was a minor, and things could happen—we could get taken away.” Any involvement with the child welfare system was to be avoided at all costs. Her mother forbade her to discuss Uncle Marcus with outsiders. There was no one Denise could turn to. And there was nowhere she felt safe. In school, Denise was a “fuck-up from day one.” She says, “I ditched all the time. I didn’t like school—it wasn’t challenging. The teachers were mainly babysitters.”
She was just an eleven-year-old, “trying to put it all together—the shit with my mom, my dad, not really being able to figure out why the hell my dad disappeared; being sexually aroused and not knowing what to do with that. I was a mess.”
Denise couldn’t concentrate and was failing her classes. It was apparent something beyond academic difficulties was in play. In the midst of all the trauma and the toxic stress it engendered, one teacher tried to help her. “I can’t remember what his name was,” Denise told me. “I wish I could thank him.” He gave Denise a glimmer of hope, offering to take her home to stay with his family if she was having problems. Ultimately nothing changed. I’d heard stories like this, classroom teachers who cared deeply for their students. But, all too often, no one from the ironically named Children’s Protective Services connected the dots. Why didn’t someone intervene to help place Denise in a better situation? I instinctively knew the answer. The child welfare system was frequently as much a source of trauma as the family.
Ultimately, Uncle Marcus disappeared, and the family moved forward as if nothing had happened. This silence blocked any conventional pathways to healing, and Denise’s problems multiplied. Her sister, who was three years older, internalized the molestation both girls had experienced at the hands of Uncle Marcus: she began molesting Denise as well. At the same time, after multiple absences, academic failures, and acting out in the classroom, Denise was expelled from the neighborhood school she’d attended since kindergarten and wound up being bused to junior high school, then high school, an hour away in the San Fernando valley. In the meantime, the family moved from the Thirties to Inglewood. It was here that Denise’s life changed drastically.
It’s hard to describe what Inglewood was like in the 1980s. It had transitioned from a small, predominately middle-class community in South Los Angeles to ground zero for gangs. The houses, once tidy with rose bushes and green lawns, now sold crack and sheltered teenagers active in the world of guns, drugs, and prostitution. Denise was one of those teenagers. She joined a hood at the height of the gang violence epidemic in Los Angeles. Three decades later, in 2018, there were fewer than 300 homicides a year, 259—still too many. But in 1989, the year Denise turned thirteen, the city of Los Angeles and its nearby areas recorded over 1,200 homicides, many of them gang related. It was a violent place in a violent time, and Denise Marshall was, in her own words, “off the chain.”
“When I was a little girl and we lived in the Thirties, I was already attracted to gangs—they did shit that I didn’t do, and I wanted to join. The neighbor who’d babysit me was an active member with the Rollin’ 30s. I admired her because she was always dressed nice. Like, Gucci outfits and the fly-ass hair. It’s all I could see. Later, I also realized that she did drugs with my mom and dad—they’d party together.”
Denise’s desire to join the Rollin’ 30s was short-circuited when the family moved to Inglewood. Instead, she joined the Imperial Village Crips, a Black gang operating in the streets that bisected the Imperial Highway. Today, they’re recognized as a Crips gang that has endured in Inglewood, well known for their connection to Tupac Shakur. One of their high-profile homies, Big Syke, was part of the rap group Thug Life, founded by Tupac. “We were Inglewatts,” Denise explained, and I knew just what she meant. Because Inglewood was dominated by the Bloods, her hood wanted to reinforce its alliance with the Watts-based Crips and their leadership.
I understood the gang alliances and beyond that, I felt a strange sort of kinship with Denise. The streets she mentioned, the territory she mapped, were as familiar to me as the lines in my palms. It was the community where I was born in a Catholic hospital across the street from Inglewood cemetery. It was where I’d grown up, in the heart of my extended Greek family, twenty years before Denise. My family had moved away, but in the end Watts had called me back. It was where I’d returned while in graduate school and then after that, first as a social worker, later training newly hired social workers, and finally as a community-based researcher and activist. It’s an understatement to say that Denise’s experience was different from mine: she had not been part of Inglewatts through a privileged life; she was there because it was her hood.
The reasons she joined the gang were all too familiar. After her stepfather left and after Uncle Marcus had also disappeared, her mother’s new boyfriend molested Denise. When Denise disclosed what happened, her mother called the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. A social worker arrived, picked up Denise, and placed her in foster care. She immediately ran away—right back home to her mother. There was no follow-up.
This happened more often than not, back in the day when DCFS workers’ responsibilities stretched to the point of absurdity, with caseloads consisting of as many as eighty families. There was absolutely no way for children’s social workers to track what was going on when they were carrying caseloads of that size. But returning home didn’t mean the family was joyfully reunited. Denise and her mother were “physically fighting by this point. She would put me out and I would be walking down the street in boxer shorts and a T-shirt and no shoes. That was my mother. She put me out of the house. On. The. Street.”
Denise had started telling me about her involvement with her hood and crime over several afternoons, talking in my office. Today was different. Today was about her need for her mother and the pain that created. She paused and looked away, out the window. Both of us were crying, tears streaking Denise’s face. We agreed it was time to stop.
The personal and environmental violence so many incarcerated women encounter from childhood on deeply affects both their emotional and social development, shaping the trajectory of their lives. Prior to incarceration, from the time they are girls, women are frequently subjected to multiple adverse factors, among which the most notable is the exposure to ongoing threats and constant violence. There is no respite from the violence, and for many girls and women, no respite from the violation of their bodies. You don’t need an advanced degree to intuit that this ever-present exposure to negative and frightening experiences results in long-term consequences for women’s mental and physical health.
In recent years, psychologists and physicians have begun to examine “adverse childhood experiences”—ACEs—and how they affect child development. More specifically, research focuses on how harmful childhood experiences negatively affect a child as she develops. Dr. Vincent Felitti created the ACEs scale, which measures ten types of childhood trauma; these describe the experiences of most of the women I have gotten to know. Five types of ACEs are personal: sexual abuse, physical abuse, verbal abuse, physical neglect, and emotional neglect. Five concern family members: a parent who is an alcoholic or addict; a mother who is a victim of domestic violence; a family member who is incarcerated; a family member diagnosed with mental illness; and loss of a parent through divorce, death, or abandonment. Each of these ten types count as one experience and a total of four appears to be a kind of threshold. One researcher, Christine White, explains that “compared with someone who has an ACE score of zero, a person with an ACE score of 4 or more is twice as likely to have heart disease and cancer, seven times more likely to be addicted to alcohol, and twelve times more likely to attempt suicide.”1
Building on the work of Felitti, White, and several others, the pediatrician Nadine Burke Harris has connected adverse childhood events to what she labels “toxic stress”—the chemical, psychological, and neurodevelopmental response to child abuse and violence that has deep and perceptible consequences for brain development. How does this all happen?
The brain’s natural ability to be alert to danger is necessary to human survival. But this is not the same as toxic stress. I value how Burke broke down toxic stress when she talked with Ira Glass on his radio show, This American Life: “If you’re in a forest and see a bear, a very efficient fight or flight system instantly floods your body with adrenaline and cortisol and shuts off the thinking portion of your brain that would stop to consider other options. This is very helpful if you’re in a forest and you need to run from a bear. The problem is when that bear comes home from the bar every night.”2
For a person who has suffered childhood trauma and toxic stress, the brain trains itself to be on alert all the time. According to Harris, the brain’s alarm system, the amygdala, actually increases in size and may be activated more often during traumatic experiences; what scientists refer to as “the architecture of the brain” is literally changed. After repeatedly responding to threat, the brain doesn’t know how to differentiate between a real and an imagined threat. Alongside this “high alert” status, children and adults suffer with stress dysregulation: they’re uncomfortable in their own bodies and relive this feeling through impulsive and aggressive behavior. This dysregulation haunts individuals throughout their lives.
Susan Burton ruefully reports, “I aced the ACEs—I’ve got a score of ten—and that’s one test I didn’t want to pass.” As I listen to Denise’s story, I feel certain that if someone administered the ACEs scale to her she too would probably score a perfect ten. While much of her experience is unique, in other ways, she wouldn’t be alone. Every woman I know has either experienced toxic stress or knows someone who experienced it because of sexual abuse or harassment.
I keep thinking of Ernestine or “Thea Ernie,” my father’s sister, who was my beloved aunt. We didn’t really develop any sort of relationship until late in her life, when she was fighting the cancer that was overtaking her body. I’d always worshipped her. There was something about Thea Ernie. She was strong and sexual—she appeared in a television documentary about menopause where she explained that she was dealing with hot flashes by learning to belly dance. By the time she died, she’d outlived five husbands—and her fifth had been over a decade younger than she. Yet, several months before she died, this beautiful, tough woman broke down over lunch, swore me to silence, and then told me how a family friend had fondled her on the “back porch of Dunsmuir Street,” the house where she and my father and their sister and brother had grown up. “Everyone thought he was so good, so kind. No one knew he trapped me back there and felt my breasts and stuck his tongue in my mouth. Then he told me it was our little secret, to keep it between us.”
When she told me this story, she was eighty-four years old and had carried this “little secret” with her for seventy years. “I thought about telling Mama, but I knew it would break her heart. I decided I just wouldn’t talk, I’d just keep going.” I asked if I could tell her story when I wrote about other women who’d experienced sexual abuse and she told me, “If it helps someone, go right ahead, you should!” adding, “Just don’t tell anyone who it was.”
There’s something in Denise that reminds me of Thea Ernie. Her toughness and resilience shine through, even as she describes something brutally heartbreaking. Denise and Thea Ernie both possessed the same hopeful determination. As we are saying good-bye, I tell her that.
“Well, maybe I got your aunt’s spirit in me,” Denise says, smiling.
“She would have loved you. She would have wanted to mother you. It was sad, she never had kids of her own.”
“I hear that,” Denise tells me. She looks at me carefully. “I’m trying to decide if I should tell you something.”
I am silent.
“I want to have a baby.”
INTERLUDE
While Janeth is locked up, Ivy and Pedro remain at large. The Los Angeles City Council is offering a $50,000 reward for “information leading to the identification and arrest of the persons responsible for the murder of Andres Ordonez.” Rewards like this are rarely offered in local homicide cases, but these were unusual circumstances and, as the motion noted, “What happened to Mr. Ordonez was an especially disturbing crime.”
In the meantime, Elie has uncovered more details surrounding the LAPD investigation. “This doesn’t look so good,” she warns me before sharing the most damaging information. Evidently, gang detectives from Rampart Division arrived on the scene soon after the shooting and recovered three shells that could be traced to a semiautomatic weapon, along with a spray-paint can near the curb. Janeth’s fingerprints and DNA were on the can. The detectives also picked up a broken beer bottle from the gutter close to the spray-paint can, and this had Ivy’s fingerprints and DNA. On top of that, graffiti on the wall included three names: Wicked, Looney, and Ivy, along with the words “Fuck Tampax”—“Tampax” being code for the Temple Street gang.
Elie is right, none of this looks good. The rumors are flying that Pedro and Ivy have gone to Mexico in Ivy’s BMW. Then a homie tells me that Pedro forced Ivy at gunpoint to sell the BMW to finance their escape. The women in the café are worried about what Pedro is doing to Ivy now. “He used to beat her, and we knew it,” Carla, a young homegirl, tells me. “Pedro was mean, we kept telling her to leave. Ivy didn’t want to, she thought she needed him. Ivy acted strong but she really didn’t think she could make it without a man. She hadn’t learned she was beautiful, just alone, without anyone.” I’m thinking about what Carla said and what kind of trauma would keep her tied to Pedro. And I wonder if the couple will disappear permanently in Mexico. Elie doesn’t think so. “Trust me,” she says quietly. “They’re going to find them.”