“But honestly,” he said, turning to Annamaria, “it was even worse when they stopped – when the images weren’t as vivid, and the pain wasn’t as intense. My parents didn’t have anyone else in the world either. I was their entire legacy, and as hard as I tried not to, I could feel myself... forgetting them – at least emotionally.”
“My dad worked security at the Canal,” Annamaria jumped in, sensing he was reaching his limit. She hadn’t talked about her family for years either – since she’d left Panama. “And my mom stayed home with my little brothers. We weren’t poor by Panamanian standards, but we didn’t have much. I shared a room with my two little brothers, and we’d converted our living room into a third bedroom for my grandmother.
“They all died in a massive earthquake when I was thirteen.”
Ryan reached down for her hand and squeezed it gently.
“For a few days I was overwhelmed with guilt for not being with them when it hit. But then I was thrown into an overcrowded orphanage with a bunch of other new orphans, mostly younger and even more confused and heartbroken than I was, and surprisingly, I was ok.
“I had a purpose. Those kids loved me. They needed me. And I needed them.” Her voice trailed off as if she were just realizing this for the first time.
“And that’s when Bradford stepped in?” Ryan asked, reaching for a box of tissues.
She pulled out a few tissues and nodded her head with a polite smile, too choked up to continue speaking. Ryan sat down next to her on the bed and gently wrapped his arm around her just as her trembling shoulders slumped forward, and she buried her face in her hands.
When the sobs finally stopped, she raised her head and looked at Ryan with red, swollen eyes that were infinitely more endearing than any photo shoot she’d ever done. “Do you know why I got my reputation as a party girl?” she asked
“Uh, are the all the tabloid stories true?” Ryan asked cautiously.
“Yes,” she answered flatly.
“Well...” Ryan started to squirm. His arm around her shoulder suddenly felt awkward, and he wasn’t sure what to do with it.
“I asked, ‘Do you know
why
I got my reputation?’" she repeated gritting her teeth, silently pleading with him – begging him to get her.
“I was trying to get pregnant!” she finally blurted out. “I wanted to have someone I knew I could trust in my life; someone whose love I never had to question; someone that I could love without worrying about what I might find out about them later on – or what they might find out about me.
“But I guess it wasn’t meant to be.”
She opened up the laptop cover and looked at the girl in the tabloid photo with equal parts shame and sympathy. “Whatever anyone has ever thought about me, I promise you I’ve thought worse. The alcohol is pretty much the only thing that makes it tolerable,” she mused.
“Two days after Bradford left, I got those,” she said, pointing to her sparsely covered chest on the computer screen.
“Wait!” Ryan exclaimed, jumping to his feet. “You got those
after
Bradford came to the orphanage?”
“Of course!” she gasped. “I was thirteen!”
“No, I mean
right
after?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know dates?” Ryan asked.
“I couldn’t forget that day if I tried. It was exactly two weeks before I was adopted. But I don’t even know which hospital I was in – somewhere in Panama City.”
“If that was before you were adopted, then who paid for the surgery? And who gave consent?” Ryan asked, his mind whirring.
“I can only assume the headmaster at the orphanage did,” Annamaria said, shaking her head disgustedly. “He was the one who met with Bradford; he must have made some deal with him. He sent me to the hospital alone – I’d never even been in a hospital before. No one told me what I was there for, and I woke up still all alone, with terrible pains in my chest and my stomach I’ll never forget.”
“Your stomach?” Ryan asked. That didn’t make any sense.
“That’s how they get the implants in without leaving any obvious scars. I’ve got one right here,” she said lifting her shirt a few inches to reveal a tiny scar just inside her belly button. “And two right here,” she added, flipping her waistband down to reveal two more tiny scars, one on each side.”
Ryan’s face went white as a sheet. “That’s not how they put implants in,” he whispered.
“Maybe not in the U.S., but I woke up with those three scars and these,” she said cupping her augmented breasts, “at the same time.”
“Annamaria, I’m so sorry,” Ryan said softly. “But I think I know why you’ve never gotten pregnant.”
CHAPTER 10
“You ok?” Ryan asked after a full minute of silence.
“No,” Annamaria answered tersely, her heartache drowned under a roiling sea of anger.
“It was probably a tubal ligation,” Ryan whispered, proceeding with extreme caution. “Those can usually...”
“You said someone contacted me on your behalf,” Annamaria said, her eyes ablaze. “When we were walking outside. You said it wasn’t your idea to contact me. Whose was it?” she demanded.
Given the opportunity to drag Dillon into this, Ryan didn't hesitate. “It was this geeky computer guy at MIT. He hacked into Avillage’s system and got the names and contact info of all the orphans. He’s actually one of us.”
“Does he know anything more about me?”
“I’d guess he probably does, but he’s pretty tight with it. I’m not sure why.”
“How far is MIT from here?” Annamaria asked, her speech still pressured.
“Mile and a half?” Ryan guessed.
“Let’s go!” she said, reaching for her hat and glasses.
~~~
Dillon’s whole body jerked, startled by the abrupt banging on his door.
Trying to make as little noise as possible, he tiptoed over to the door and peeked into the peephole. Nothing but black. Whoever was out in the hall must’ve been covering it up. “Who is it?” he asked with a low but self-conscious, cracking voice that just screamed computer nerd.
“Open the door,” Ryan demanded, continuing to bang away.
Dillon timidly unlocked the door and cracked it a few inches to find Ryan standing in the hallway with an angry yet disconcertingly satisfied look.
“I tried to call you...” Dillon stammered.
“Hmm, that’s weird. Because I had my walkie-talkie on me all day yesterday and today, and I never heard a thing.” Ryan stared him down, inching progressively closer to the doorway.
“Oh. I was must’ve been on the wrong channel.” He was pretty sure Ryan would never resort to physical violence, but the shred of doubt that remained was enough to shoot his heart rate into the 130s.
Ryan gave him one more glare and then brusquely shoved the door wide open, to reveal a still seething Annamaria standing to his right.
Dillon staggered back a few steps, his eyes like saucers, suddenly feeling light-headed. Annamaria’s face, meanwhile, visibly sank, as if Ryan had just exposed Oz from behind the green curtain.
This
was their source? He was about five-four, skinnier than Annamaria, and didn’t look a day over fourteen.
Dillon held his gaze on Annamaria just long enough to register her first impression before his eyes darted sheepishly down toward the floor. A deep blush replaced the usual pallor of his cheeks – yet another face-to-face encounter he’d be forced to start in a deep hole.
Always the same reaction!
It seemed to hurt more each time.
Ryan walked in behind Annamaria and closed the door. “Can we talk here?” he asked, more to appease Dillon than out of any concern of his own. Dillon had been making great money for himself and his shareholders with his steady release of apps for five years now. No one in their right mind would have continued to surveil him that long without coming up with anything.
Dillon reached over and turned up the grinding, manic-depressive music pouring through his computer speakers. “Yeah, we can talk now,” he said nervously, just audible above the music.
“Do you know anything about me or am I just pissing away time here?” Annamaria hissed with the tone of a queen addressing one of her subjects, unable to get over the fact that she was relying on what appeared to be a middle school nerd.
“Yes I know something, and yes, you’re wasting your time here,” Dillon sneered, shaking his head in disgust.
“Look,” Annamaria shot back, her accent picking up. “If you think
I
need
you
, you are sorely mistaken, my little friend. All I need is a doctor to confirm what happened to me, and I’ll be on the front page of every paper in the country tomorrow.”
“What
happened
to you?” Dillon asked, with no idea what she was talking about.
She folded her waistband down, as Dillon stared at the small scars, equally embarrassed by their location and confused about their significance.
“Oh my God! You didn’t even know about it?” Annamaria sighed, rolling her eyes and turning for the door.
“I think Annamaria had a tubal ligation,” Ryan muttered quietly to Dillon, getting nothing but a blank look in return. “Tubes tied.”
“Whoa!” Dillon gasped, finally clued in. “Wait! Don’t go. We need to talk.”
“Annamaria, I think you should stay,” Ryan said softly. “You came all the way from New York for this.”
She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to force herself into a rational decision, when the only thing she wanted to do was run out of the room and never look back.
“Two things I want you to think about,” Ryan said. “And I’m not trying to cause you any more pain. One: there were other poor, orphaned teenage girls surreptitiously sterilized after the Panama disaster. I read a New York Times piece on it a couple of years ago. It’s happened in other developing countries after devastating natural disasters too. It was a terrible thing that happened to you, but it didn’t happen only to you. It might be harder than you think to pin that on Avillage, and I’m sure if they’re at the bottom of this, they’d be well aware of that.
“Two: Dillon does know what he’s doing. Yes, he’s a pain in the ass to work with, but you can’t question his commitment. He’s been as angry as you are right now for five straight years.”
Dillon didn’t exactly take it as a compliment, but he also couldn’t protest what was a pretty accurate characterization.
Annamaria’s face relaxed slightly, as she let out a long sigh and slowly sat down on the corner of Dillon’s bed.
“Here’s what I’ve got,” Dillon said, snuggling up to his computer. “Your ticker symbol is BUTY, which I’m sure you already knew, and your chairman is Aaron Bradford. He’s also the chairman of one of the Yankees’ top pitching prospects (also from Panama,) who he discovered on the same trip he met you. The only other kid of note he’s been chairman for was J’Quarius Jones, who, unfortunately, is dead.
“Prior to your going public, a partial ownership gift of 1.5% was transferred to a Carlos Villanueva...”
“I knew it!” Annamaria shouted, slamming her fist into the mattress.
“What? Who’s Carlos Villanueva?” Ryan asked.
“The headmaster at my orphanage,” she said, her lower lip quivering. “He sold me like a slave.”
“And he’s been making a
lot
of money off of you,” Dillon pointed out, trying to fan the flames.
“Maybe,” Ryan said. “You were adopted
after
Avillage started offering a 1.5% ownership stake to anyone who referred an orphan that went on to be successfully adopted. What he got would’ve been standard.”
“Still, he referred you, didn't he?” Dillon said, scowling at Ryan. “So when was your... uh... procedure done?”
“Fourteen days before I was adopted,” she said, biting down on the inside of her lower lip.
“So 12 days before her IPO,” Ryan added.
Dillon was typing and clicking and scrolling maniacally. “Hmm,” he said. “It doesn’t look like there’s any paper trail of any meeting in Panama at all around that time. Bradford’s travel plans were well documented, but he either doesn’t use computers or he covers his tracks so well that he leaves absolutely no record of what he’s been up to.”
“Well, he definitely wasn’t in Panama at the time of your surgery because that was the day J’Quarius died,” Ryan said, putting the dates together in his head.
“Who’s J’Quarius again?” Annamaria asked.
“He was another orphan chaired by Bradford,” Ryan said. “A lot of people thought he had the potential to be one of the greatest basketball players of all time, but he died just before he turned eighteen of a heart condition, which either was or should have been diagnosed a week beforehand, when he’d collapsed on the court during a game.
“After he died, Bradford sued the University of Chicago Children's Hospital, where he’d initially been treated, for failing to disclose the risks of the heart condition that had caused his death. The hospital ended up settling out of court.”
“The amount was never disclosed!” Dillon chimed in.
“Dillon thinks it was all a PR stunt on Bradford's part, and he might be right, but the day the court settlement was announced, Bradford did donate a million bucks in J’Quarius Jones’s name to a foundation that identifies and treats kids with the same kind of heart condition he had.”
“Get your head out of your ass!” Dillon blurted out. “That was his own money! He talked to the doctors the day J’Quarius passed out the first time. He got the whole story. And then he sat there in the stands with those rich Russian team owners and just watched him die.
“Bradford’s not an idiot. You know he had that kid’s life insured for more than a million dollars.” Then he softened his tone as he turned to Annamaria. “J’Quarius’s parents never forgave him. They actually tried to block the piece of shit from being allowed to use J’Quarius’s name for the foundation. They were very vocal.”
“So how did Bradford get out of that?” Annamaria asked.
“Oh, he was very apologetic publicly. Said he couldn’t even imagine what the adoptive parents were going through,” Dillon said disgustedly. “Then he kept bringing up that the one thing he could take solace in was that at least he’d been instrumental in picking them as the perfect parents for J’Quarius. The media bought it hook, line and sinker. He’s a scumbag. Probably the worst guy in the whole company.”
“But he’s not your chairman?” Dillon was kind of growing on her.
“Nope. Bradford’s second in command at Avillage. My chairman’s some mid-level yes-man who’s too stupid to be sinister. If he never showed up for work again, it’d probably take weeks for someone to notice.”
“What about you?” she asked Ryan.
“Him?” Dillon jumped in. “No, no. Ryan’s chairman is the head honcho. None other than James Prescott himself – the founder and CEO of Avillage. Prescott gets shares in all of us, but he’s only the chairman for one,” he said pointing a sideways thumb at Ryan. “And he’s been buying every time the golden boy’s price dips.”
“Really? What’s he like?” she asked Ryan hesitantly.
"I don’t know. He's not that bad,” Ryan shrugged. “He was a little tough on certain things. Probably a little too intent on making sure I learned that life isn’t fair, but nothing compared to what happened to you guys.
“I mean, he didn’t let me participate in certain activities or go on certain field trips growing up. Things like that. And the only college he let me to apply to was Harvard. But my life’s pretty good.
“He’s obviously not as benevolent as he claims to be, but he did set me up with good parents, I am getting a Harvard degree, and I probably
am
better off now than I would’ve been if Avillage hadn’t adopt me out of that orphanage. It's just...”
“When are you going to wake up?” Dillon butted in, physically sickened by what he’d just heard.
“When are you?” Ryan shot back. “This is our life! Like it or not. Laws were changed – well before any of us were ever orphans. And you’ve got no
proof
of anything. You have suspicion built on suspicion that only leads to more suspicion. You hand-pick what information you choose to dole out, and it
always
supports your theories. Then you keep everything else hidden. Sorry, but I personally am not that bad off. She needs to hear the whole story.”
“Annamaria was sterilized! My dad was put away for life for what should have been a few years at most! J’Quarius Jones is dead! Your parents were murdered!” Dillon exclaimed, his voice rising as he spoke.
“That’s enough,” Ryan warned, his glare squarely back on Dillon.
But this time Dillon wasn't backing down. “And you’re padding the bank accounts of the people who murdered them!”
“My parents were killed in a head-on collision. I saw it,” Ryan insisted through gritted teeth.
Dillon cackled condescendingly. “A
fatal
car accident involving
both
of your parents exactly three months before the opening of Avillage? They were
murdered!”
“Enough!” Ryan shouted, leaning in inches from Dillon’s face. Dillon matched his stare for a few seconds, and then tilted his head slightly, raising his eyebrows, tacitly questioning whose side Ryan was on.
Ryan took a couple of deep, slow breaths to collect himself and then turned toward Annamaria. “You see what I mean?
“I’ve gotta get out of here. Do you want to come with me?”
“Actually,” Annamaria waffled, holding her gaze to the floor, “I think I’m gonna stay here a little while longer.”
“Oh. Yeah, no problem,” Ryan said reassuringly. “Don’t worry about it. You’ve got my number if you want to talk again. Just… don’t do anything rash.”