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I wouldn’t push her into talking about what had happened if she didn’t want to, but at the same time I really needed to make sure she was okay. The sensible thing would have been to have taken her straight to a hospital or a police station last night, but I couldn’t have done that. It would have been too risky for me personally, and with Brooke having been so out of it, I hadn’t wanted to make decisions for her.

She shook her head like she was trying to clear her thoughts. ‘I remember snatches of things. They kept giving me bottles of water with the top already off. Jessie … I think they were giving me drugs.’

She said it so seriously I had to laugh.

‘Yeah,’ I said, reaching out to take her hand. ‘You were definitely on something.’

‘Shit,’ she drawled. ‘I’ve never done drugs before, and I couldn’t even enjoy it my first time.’

I squeezed Brooke’s hand, appreciating that she needed to joke about it. I thought she’d probably been given a date rape drug – something that would blur her memories and make her compliant. I wasn’t going to say that out loud unless she did, though. I didn’t need to make her paranoid.

‘Did they say why you? Why us?’

Brooke shook her head and frowned. Her fingers played with the frayed rip in her shorts, and I tried to give her the space to think things through.

‘Drugs,’ she said angrily.

‘What, like, dealing them?’ I asked.

She looked up at me. ‘He wasn’t importing avocados. It was drugs.’

I had a sudden moment of clarity, of what a dangerous person Chris must be if he was importing drugs over the southern border. I couldn’t let myself reflect on that, though, or I’d get freaked out all over again.

‘That’s …wild, Brooke,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ she replied, like she needed me to confirm that before she could believe it. ‘I think they wanted me to be, like … what’s the name of someone who smuggles stuff over the border?’

‘A drug mule?’

‘Yeah,’ she said, pointing at me. ‘They wanted me to be a drug mule.’

‘Why were they following you specifically, though? I don’t get it.’

‘The woman …’ Brooke looked down at her shorts again. ‘Her name is Ashley. She knew we had run away. She has some way of tracking missing people by listening to bulletins or something. Police reports, maybe?’

I nodded. ‘Maybe. How did they follow us after you found the tracker, though?’

‘Turns out Luca at the garage is a really bad liar,’ she said with a wry smile.

‘Oh, shit.’

‘It’s not his fault. They didn’t believe him and one of the other mechanics mentioned something about Denver … Jessie, I think they’ve been following us the whole time. They were just waiting for their chance.’

That was genuinely terrifying.

‘Why did they want you?’ I asked.

‘They find runaways and take them down to El Paso and threaten to kill their families unless they take drugs back and forth across the border.’

‘Holy crap,’ I muttered, pushing down my instinct to be even more terrified by this new information.

Brooke nodded. ‘They knew what they were doing. They knew me, anyway.’

‘They knew your name?’

‘Yeah. And they knew who my dad is. His job.’

‘To blackmail him?’ I asked.