“Yeah,” Destiny was saying. “It was time for me to get married. I climbed out of my bedroom window and took off barefooted across the fields.” Her face drooped. “I left my siblings behind.”
“How many?” I peeked down to make sure my phone was still recording this. D.C. had one-party consent laws, and I definitely consented to having this information heading to the FBI.
She paused again.
I raised my eyebrows to my hairline. “A lot?”
“Don’t judge.”
I shook my head.
“My mom was one of twenty sister wives, and I have seventy-three brothers and sisters.”
I threw my head back and laughed. It surprised the shit out of me, and by the wide-eyed look on her face, it surprised Destiny as well.
“Sorry. I was picturing you trying to save your siblings, and in my imagination, it looked a lot like a clown car.”
A smile spread across her face. “Yeah. You’re right. Well, there was no way to pull them out of that situation. I couldn’t care for them. It took me this long to start to care for myself. They’re going to have to save themselves.”
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Do you think they’re looking for you?”
“Yes.”
“Why? I mean, if you don’t believe in their message, and you want to go, why not just let you?”
“If I had worked on the farm or in childcare or even in the craft room, I think they would have since I’m an adult.” She stared at the door as if she was waiting for it to burst open and the boogieman to be on the other side. “I don’t think they’d drag me back, no. Because then they’d have to watch me too closely. They had used my brothers and sisters against me. You know, like if I did something wrong, they didn’t whip me. They picked up one of my younger sisters and belted them in front of me. Of course, that gave them all the control they wanted. But I figured out that if I wasn’t there to see the belting, then they wouldn’t do it because it served no purpose.”
“So, what do you think they’d do if they found you?”
Destiny stood up and walked toward the kitchen. “Huahine set aside a to-go order that no one came to pick up. Weird because they paid for it over the phone with a credit card. He didn’t want it. He eats his fill as he goes along cooking. But he knows we’re trying to get our feet under us. If we’re careful, there’s like two-three days’ worth of food in there.”
“Serious?”
“Yeah, come fix up a plate, and I’ll start the oven. We can just stick them in for a few minutes to brush the cold off.”
I’d pushed as far as I could. But this was information. She knew something from the office that made her a target. She was in fear for her life. It was in her eyes. In her posture. In her inability to just answer my question.
If I was on the run like she was and had time to contemplate and make a plan, one thing I’d do was bring evidence out with me. A safety measure. Surely, that was what she’d done.
I hoped that after I introduced her to Finley and Prescott, she’d tell them where it was hidden.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Monday morning, Destiny got up before dawn. Today, she was scheduled at the diner for the four to noon shift. The breakfast rush was the most lucrative, and Destiny said she liked getting the work done and having a long afternoon to sit and read her school textbooks, learning what the rest of us had in grammar school.
My shift was the tail of the breakfast rush through the lunch crowd—seven to three. This worked out perfectly because this afternoon, I needed to meet with Prescott and Finley, and tonight I was having bridesmaid’s cocktails for Christen, who’d just come in from Iraq.
I’d told Destiny that after work, I would drive around D.C. and scope out some of the tourist things to do and make a list. I wanted to see Arlington Cemetery, the Smithsonian, and the memorials. I didn’t invite her to join me and had crossed my fingers that she wouldn’t ask to come along. She hadn’t.
Destiny picked her uniform off the plastic hook and headed into the bathroom to get dressed while I pretended to sleep.
I took advantage of the privacy to position myself cross-legged on the floor with my pillow doubled under my sits bones, my palms facing up as they rested on my knees.
In my training, both Master Wang and Spyder had taught me that the present is all there is.
But as I scanned my body, focused on my breath, and tried to descend into an altered conscience, my meditation this morning was interrupted with memories.
I knew better than to fight them away.
The goal was to not have a goal. To sit. To breathe. To allow quiet to find me.
But my busy buzzing hive of a mind did not allow for my normal meditative state. Typically, I sat, focused on my breath, and went blank. An intruding physical sensation might tug at me, an itchy nose, a strand of hair on my cheek. A feeling might bubble up—anxiety, what have you. A thought—I can’t forget to call… But rarely was I offered memories, especially memories that I was being force-fed.
I decided that rather than fighting it, which was a meditative no-no,
