by Alyse Zaftig
“How dare you show your face here?” my fiancée’s father told me.
“Stop,” I told him before catching his wrist and spinning him before twisting his arm behind his back.
“Let go of him.” Naelle’s face was full of fury and confusion.
“Listen to me, both of you.” I tightened my grip on her father’s wrist.
“I didn’t know who Naelle was, or more importantly who you were. I fell in love with your daughter purely by chance.”
“Love,” he spat as if it were a foul taste in his mouth. “You’re not allowed to love my daughter.”
“What are you talking about?” Naelle asked.
“You knew who she was,” Naelle’s father said. “You manipulated her to get to me. You knew that I was investigating you and wanted to keep me from busting you for the drug lord that you are.”
“Is that true?” Naelle said, tears in her eyes. “You’re a drug lord, the kind of scum that my dad has hunted for years? You just played me?”
I looked at Naelle full in the face. “Naelle, I proposed to you because I loved you. Your ring…my promise…none of that has anything to do with your father. I didn’t know until I looked into your background a little more deeply.”
Her eyes were still filling with tears, but her voice was steady as she told me, “You need to go now.”
Her father took that moment to stomp on my instep. I let go of his arm and he whirled around the face me.
I opened my palms and raised my hands to show him that I was unarmed. I had a gun in my boot, of course, but I wasn’t about to use it on her father.
“I’ll go. Naelle, we’ll talk later. I’m so sorry about this.”
“Sorry,” she spat like it tasted awful. She shook her head. “There’s nothing to talk about,” she told me. Now, her voice was beginning to shake. “Goodbye.”
I looked at her eyes, which were full of unshed tears, and then I looked at her father, who looked like he was about to draw the gun in his shoulder holster. I could see the outline of it under his suit jacket.
“I’ll go. Naelle, when you’re ready to talk, I’ll be waiting.”
It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but I walked out that door, leaving Naelle.
Devastated
Naelle
I watched as the door closed after Emilio.
“Do you know who that is?”
“Emilio,” I said, my salty tears falling down my cheeks.
“Emilio Gabria!” My father paced. “You brought home Emilio Gabria!”
“I had no clue who he was,” I protested. “When they found cocaine on the jet, he said that it wasn’t his. And I got the impression from the police officer that the police didn’t think that the Omega cocaine was his, either.”
“That’s because his cartel’s biggest rivals are the Omegas. If you found cocaine with their mark on it in his plane, then they’re trying to get rid of him.”
I blinked at my dad.
“So you weren’t the one who kept me from coming back to America?”
“You better tell me the whole story, pumpkin.”
He walked into our living room, which was as pristine as my mother always kept it. It felt surreal to walk into my DC life as if nothing at all had happened. I’d fallen in love like a ton of bricks, and all that it had earned me was heartbreak.
“There’s not much to tell, Daddy.”
“Humor me.”
“Well…I went to a trivia night where I met Emilio.”
I coughed, my cheeks heating up. I couldn’t talk about this kind of stuff with my dad.
“Skip over the embarrassing parts.”
I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
My dad choked.
“Are you wearing an engagement ring?”
His face was flushing.
“Yes,” I said, blushing harder.
“How in… well, tell me about how you got there.”
“I met him, um, skipping over this part, then I accidentally went into his secret cabin in Quito.”
“Secret cabin?”
“It’s near the TeleferiQo.”
“Good to know.”
I saw my dad turn to look at a pad of paper on the side table.
“Dad, I don’t want you to hunt him down.”
“Pumpkin, I may not have a choice. I’ve been trying to hunt down Emilio Gabria for years…and then he showed up on my doorstep with my daughter, who was wearing his ring.”
I slid the ring off of my finger. At that moment, a ray of sunlight hit the emerald, making it light up.
“It’s beautiful,” I said, my heart heavy. I knew that I’d have to send it back.
“Okay, you accidentally went into his cabin, and then?”
“He was going to make me come back to the United States…he seemed really paranoid, thinking that I was some kind of spy.”
“Reasonable,” my dad said, nodding.
“Daddy!” I frowned fiercely at him. “Going to Ecuador was completely impulsive. I didn’t go there to hunt down a drug lord.”
“But that’s what you caught.”
I glared.
“Do you want me to tell you what happened or not?”
He held his hands up.
“Okay, I won’t interrupt anymore.”
“But they…like I said, they didn’t let us take off because of the baggie of cocaine that the police officer, Aguilera, found in the plane. Then Officer Ortiz let us go.”
“He has half of the police force of Ecuador on his payroll. It’s not like here, pumpkin. If you’re an Ecuadorian police officer, the entirety of the country is your jurisdiction, and half of them are on his payroll. The other half are on the Omega payroll.”
“You said you wouldn’t interrupt!”
“Sorry.” My dad pantomimed zipping his lips.
“And then we went back to his place. He didn’t seem to think that I was a spy anymore. I met his brother, who is a huge cocaine addict, and I freaked out. We went home. When I woke up, he had an engagement ring.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that,” I said, confirming it. “I told you, I fell in love like a ton of bricks. It was as if I couldn’t imagine my life without him. I don’t know, Dad. It was the strangest thing, but it felt so right.”
I was still holding my ring.
“I know I have to send it back.”
“Is that the whole story?”
“No.” I sighed and looked out the window.
“I made our engagement conditional. I said that he had to meet my family before I really agreed to marry him, but he gave me the ring anyway.”
“You’re definitely sending it back. Now that he’s met your family, there’s no way that the two of you can get married. Hell, if I were really doing my job, I’d use your information to nab this guy.”
“I don’t think he knew who I was early on,” I protested. “He didn’t hurt me, even when he thought that I’d been sent to spy on him. Don’t go after him.”
My dad just shook his head.
“How about this? You go down to the DHL Store and I make some calls, okay?”
“Okay.”
I went to get my purse and walked to the nearest DHL Store.
When I got there, I headed straight for the free envelopes and a piece of paper. I used one of the DHL pens, the kind that are attached to the countertop. It only took a little while for me to send it back to Ecuador. I didn’t really know Emilio’s address, but I did know the nearest intersection. In Ecuador, the address system wasn’t as exact as the American one. Often, the best you could do was the nearest intersection, so it would have to be enough.
I nearly cried when I handed over my beautiful engagement ring. All of those dreams were gone. I felt like I had a hole in my heart, even though we’d known each other for such a short period.
Easy come, easy go.
Part II
Ring Return
Emilio
“Packa
ge for you, sir.”
I nodded in thanks before grabbing an envelope from my doorman. Most mail wasn’t sent directly to me.
I opened the envelope and then dropped it like it was on fire.
It was a DHL package that contained something I didn’t want at all.
Naelle’s engagement ring had fallen out of the envelope. It sat there, twinkling innocently on the ground, as if there weren’t a steel knife plunged into my heart at the sight of it here and now.
I sank to my knees. I stared at it. I couldn’t pick it up.
I couldn’t even breathe.
I’d done a lot of terrible things in my life. I had killed without a second thought. I sold drugs to people and made them addicted for life.
But hurting Naelle was easily the worst thing I had ever done.
And it was coming back to haunt me.
I noticed the edge of a piece of paper peeking out from the envelope’s open flap. The envelope wasn’t empty. There was a letter inside.
I didn’t want to read it, but I had to.
I reached for the letter first. I unfolded it.
The words cut me more deeply than a razor blade.
I thought that this was mine, but it’s not.
I dropped it as if it had scorched me.
We were done.
I clutched the center of my chest, but the pain didn’t stop.
I knew in that moment that I wasn’t going to passively accept her ring back. It belonged on her finger. She belonged to me, whether she believed it or not. I’d have to soothe her fears and fix whatever her father had told her about me, but I was willing to go the distance for her.
She was worth it.
Fish Creek
Naelle
TWO MONTHS LATER
I made some tea. The microwave in this tiny cabin looked like it was from 1980, but it still worked.
When I came back to the house, my dad had already arranged to send me to the safest place he could think of: a cabin owned by a buddy of his in the woods in the north part of Wisconsin, what Cheeseheads referred to as Up North.
So here I was, in a small cabin in Door County. I was apparently in a town so small that it was called Fish Creek. I could get groceries, I thought, but when I’d gotten here, the cabin was fully stocked with everything that I would need, as if I needed to be fortified for the zombie apocalypse. The longer that I stayed here, the lower chance I had of having to interact with the outside world.
The only thing I wanted to do was lick my wounds. I’d fallen in love too fast, and now I was paying the price of my stupidity.
Yesterday, I’d pan-fried some of the fish that I found in the fridge. I’d woken up with food poisoning and thrown up in my bathroom, so I had to make tea to settle my stomach.
I wanted ginger ale, though. My mother always insisted on keeping some on hand, except whoever had stocked the cabin hadn’t brought any.
I had a little rental car that I’d driven up from Milwaukee. I was so far north that I was basically in Canada, my cabin was very close to Lake Michigan, and eerily quiet, a little too much like a horror movie for a city girl to be really comfortable.
Up here, I was safely alone, but there wasn’t much to do. I spent a lot of time on Facebook, but doing Castleville quests was already getting really old.
I sighed. Maybe I should go into “town.” They would probably have ginger ale there.
I rinsed out my mouth with some Crest mouthwash before getting dressed. I tied my hair into a sloppy bun, because I just didn’t care. My mother would have a fit if she saw me out of the house with my hair like this, but whatever. There wasn’t really anybody here whose opinion I cared about.
I drove for longer than I wanted to in order to get to the nearest store, a big Woodman’s store.
When I got inside, everything was in disarray. I got the impression that the store stocked just about everything, if you could find it. Sort of like a room which magically produced everything you wanted but made what you wanted the hardest thing to find.
I hunted high and low for ginger ale, but it wasn’t in the soda aisle. I walked through the liquor aisle, and I found it there, even though it was completely nonalcoholic.
I lugged a case of ginger ale — they didn’t have anything smaller — to the register, where the cashier, a girl who was supermodel-tall and gorgeous was chewing gum. She had long, straight blonde hair and high cheekbones. She looked like she belonged on the cover of a magazine. I wondered what she was doing here, in the middle of nowhere.
I shrugged. I wasn’t the only one who had problems. Fish Creek was an easy place to hide, so small that strangers were notable. I got the impression that everybody knew everybody else up here.
I was an odd girl out, with my dark eyes, Brazilian blowout, and brown skin. Everyone here looked like a Viking.
They’d been kind enough, though the little kids stared a lot more than I was used to in DC.
I put my case of ginger ale on the countertop.
“Just ginger ale?” the cashier asked.
I nodded.
“I threw up this morning.”
“Do you want any medicine? Do you still feel sick?”
I shook my head.
“Nope. I don’t feel sick at all. It was weird…just a little food poisoning, I guess.”
She looked at me for a moment, as if trying to decide something.
“No offense, but maybe you want to pick up one of our pregnancy tests? They’re in the pharmacy section.”
I felt the floor move under my feet.
“Pregnancy test?”
“Why not? No harm, right?”
I stared at this stranger who was suggesting something unimaginable.
Freaking out, I started counting in my head.
“Could you grab one for me?”
She took a quick look around the store. Nobody was there besides us.
“Sure thing.”
She walked quickly with the instinct of a bloodhound. I felt like I’d been a blind woman rummaging through Woodman’s, but she knew exactly what she was doing. Maybe she was native to Fish Creek, not a runaway like me.
Twenty seconds later, she had an EPT box in her hands.
“Here you go. If you take it and get a positive result, there are some clinics within driving distance…you can find an OBGYN.”
I looked at her and couldn’t process what she was saying. I knew that she was speaking English, but I was flipping out.
“Thank you.”
“You betcha.”
I gave her my credit card and she rang me up. I hadn’t used my credit card since I’d come up here, because I simply hadn’t needed to buy anything.
I didn’t even know which answer I wanted. If I had a baby…if I really…I was a mess.
“All done!”
She pushed the case of ginger ale at me with the EPT box on top. She slid the receipt across the counter, and then I signed it.
“Do you need a bag?”
I shook my head. I tucked the EPT box into my purse.
Real Dream
Naelle
When I went home, I immediately went to the bathroom. I didn’t know if it was performance anxiety or just plain anxiety, but I just couldn’t do it. I put the stick on the counter and chugged two ginger ales, which tasted like ambrosia or unicorn tears…or maybe both.
A few minutes later, I was ready to take the test.
I put it back on the counter while I waited for the result, my mind a confused whirl. I didn’t know what I was even hoping for.
When the time was up, I looked at it.
The result was positive. I was having a baby.
I couldn’t process this, any of it. I knew that if I were responsible, I’d be making an appointment with a doctor to confirm my pregnancy and get…prenatal vitamins and some instructions or something. Was there some kind of parenting handbook?
I couldn’t do it alone. I needed to tell my parents…and maybe Emilio.
But I had an emotional overload for the day. I couldn’t do anything but wash my hands, put on my pajamas, and go to sleep.
Somehow, even though it should have been impossible with how many things I had on my mind, I fell asleep.
I was having the dream that I had every night when I closed my eyes. In it, Emilio was with me.
“Come back,” he told me.
“I can’t,” I told him. “I have to think of the baby.”
Dream Emilio reacted differently every other time.
He exploded out of his chair and came close to me before putting his warm hand on my stomach.
“You’re pregnant?”
“With your child, but we aren’t together anymore.”
Like a magic trick, he was holding my engagement ring in his hand. What a nice dream.
“We can be. Your child can have both parents if you just try to work with me.”
“Do you think we can?” I asked Dream Emilio. “I mean, my father literally hunts you for a living. How could this ever work?”
“You know that I take what I want.”
“Yes.”
“I want you, Naelle. Come with me. I promise that we’ll find a way to be together.”
I put my hand over his hand, which was still resting on the gentle curve of my stomach where our baby was growing.
I regretted the way that I had sent back the ring. At the time, I’d been so horrified that I was in love with a notorious drug lord that I couldn’t imagine raising a child with him.
But my time here in the cabin had changed my mind. I knew that he would be a good father. He might not be a good man. He was a murderer, who ran an organization full of criminals.
But he treated me like a princess, and I knew from the way that he treated his family that his blood meant everything to him. He would love our child just as much as he loved the rest of his family.
And I knew that he loved me.