Focus: Exposure Series Book Two

by Jocoby, Annie

  My heart was in my shoes, though. There was a large part of me, probably 90% of me, that didn’t really want Emily to tell me anything.

  Could I remain in denial for a little while longer?

  She looked at me, as if she was contemplating telling me. But then she shook her head. “I can’t. I can’t do it. I’m so sorry.”

  I nodded my head. Perhaps I could try a different tact. I could find out her story, find out why she was in the hospital. Then it could provide me a clue on why I was there as well.

  That seemed like a decent plan. A clue would be a way to slowly, slowly get at the devastating news that nobody seemed to want to tell me. That seemed to be a better way of finding out then finding it all out at once.

  Ripping off the bandaid sometimes was a good idea, sometimes not. In this case, I thought that the bandaid approach wouldn’t be the best thing in the entire world.

  “Why were you in the hospital?” I asked her.

  She took a deep breath. “I was a drug addict for six years. I had a son. I loved him so much. But, I have to admit, that I loved the needle more. I will say that I used just enough to get me through the day most of the time. I was a functioning addict for the most part.”

  “A functioning addict?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I was able to care for my son, in other words. And I was lucky. I didn’t have to work, and I only had to care for him, because my father is extremely wealthy. I was in college, though, studying law. My goal was to have my own firm someday, doing criminal defense and helping out the downtrodden. I was even ahead a few grades, because I graduated college when I was only 19.”

  “And you were able to get through school okay?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I was. I was in my last semester. You have to understand, addicts aren’t always the junkies you imagine. Living on the streets, prostituting themselves for a fix. They’re often people that you would never dream of. People who seemed to have it all. People like me.”

  “I think that’s true,” I said. “I’ve never known any addicts, but I’m never one to judge. Anyhow, go on with your story.”

  She nodded her head, and tears came to her eyes. “I was functioning for the most part. But sometimes I went on a bender. I don’t even know why, but that was just how it was sometimes. It’s like a functioning alcoholic. They drink to get through the day, but sometimes they drink to excess and get sloppy and kill somebody behind the wheel. Just like that, there were times when I would shoot up to excess and not know what the hell was going on. And sometimes it would hit me late, so I would start out feeling normal, but, just like that, I would pass out.”

  I was silent, letting her get it all out.

  “This was so hard for me to talk about. And I couldn’t talk about it, much, until I met you in the hospital. You were so open, and willing to share. You inspired me to do the same.”

  “What exactly was so hard for you to talk about?” With every word she said, I had a feeling of sinking further and further into a pit. Because whatever it was she was going to tell me, I had a similar story that I told her. A part of me wanted to stop her, right then and there. Not to tell me why she was in the hospital for all those months, because, if she told me her story, she would be indirectly telling me mine.

  She was silent for a long time. She started to cry, and I put my hand on hers.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’ve come to terms with it, finally. I’ve even worked hard on forgiving myself. But I still have a hard time talking about it without breaking down into tears.” She lifted up her chin, her green eyes absolutely filled with heartbreaking tears.

  “Go on,” I said softly. “You need to get it out, whatever it is.”

  “But CJ,” she said. “If I tell you what happened to me, you’re going to sort of know what happened to you. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  I nodded. “I don’t really want to, because I’m not so sure I’m ready to put the pieces together on what happened to me just yet. But it needs to happen. So, please, go on.”

  She took another deep breath and drank some more of her water. “I took my son to a playground one day. I had gotten high before I took him, and I guess I didn’t really know how high I was. As I said, there was sometimes a delayed reaction with me. I thought I was okay, but I really wasn’t.” Another deep breath. “I passed out on the playground with him. Nobody noticed, I guess, because I was under a tree, drifting off out of view, really, of the other mothers and the kids. A man took my child, CJ. I came to, and he was gone. And he has never been found.”

  I gasped involuntarily. “Oh, my God,” I said. “That’s horrible. That’s the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And I really didn’t know what had happened, even when I came to. I was still high, and the whole thing seemed surreal. The police questioned me, and I didn’t know what to tell them. They questioned everyone around that playground, and only one mother saw what had happened. There really weren’t that many people there, unfortunately – just two other children and their mothers. One of those mothers wasn’t paying much attention, but the other saw the man who took him and I guess she thought that he was my child’s father.”

  “Did they ever catch the guy?”

  “No,” she said. “They never did. They did an Amber Alert and everything, and did a police sketch. He must have been wearing a disguise, or something, because it’s been nine months now, and there’s been no information about Shane at all.”

  “This happened nine months ago?” I said. “I guess that means you went into the hospital soon after.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I had a complete physical and mental breakdown over it. I couldn’t eat at all, and I got down to 80 pounds. I couldn’t sleep because of the constant nightmares. I had to be sedated when I got to the hospital. I was admitted two weeks after the incident. I was a shell of myself. Until you.”

  I swallowed, hard. “Until me.” I didn’t want to ask this next question. “So, I guess I had a similar story to yours?”

  It was then that I realized that I still couldn’t get in touch with my mother. She hadn’t returned a single one of my calls. I usually visited her on Sundays, but I didn’t this past Sunday, because I was with Asher. It was peculiar that she didn’t call me to ask me where I was. What I was bringing for dinner. Or any of that.

  I suddenly felt that I needed to run away. Get away from Emily. Get away from everyone. Crawl into a dark hole, where I could never, ever find out what had happened to me. Something horrible happened, something that was horrible enough for me to check myself into a mental hospital.

  Something that had commonalities with Emily’s heartbreaking story.

  She nodded her head. “Yes,” she said. “Your story was very similar to mine.”

  All at once, I had to talk to my mom. I had to. I had to make sure that she was okay, and that Nathaniel and Stella were too.

  But fate had a way of keeping me in the dark, unfortunately. Because there was another girl who felt the need to get in touch with me.

  Her name was Marisa.

  Chapter 28

  Emily and I had stayed at that bar for a few more hours after she told me her harrowing story. I didn’t ask her, directly, what had happened to me, because it was all becoming too close. Too scary. The mind has a way of shutting out things that it doesn’t want to know about, and my mind was no different.

  So, we talked around my issue for the rest of the evening. I really got to know her, though, and I felt for her. She seemed like such a cool person, and it was truly devastating that she had to go through so much. She was trying to piece her life back together, though, and had enrolled to finish her law degree at Columbia. Her parents were still supportive, and everyone was still hopeful that, one day, Shane would be back with her.

  Because, while Shane was never found, his body wasn’t, either. That gave Emily and her parents a slight glimmer of hope. Her father had engaged every private investiga
tor in town to look into the case, and, so far, all roads led to a dead-end. But Emily’s greatest hope was that Shane would be found and she could have her life back. Because, without Shane, her life was truly nowhere. She went through the motions of life, but never could feel any real joy in what she was doing.

  We made a pact, though, to keep in touch.

  “Because, CJ,” she said to me. “You’re going to need me someday, and I hope that I can be there for you, too. Just like you were there for me. I know what you’re going through. Or what you will be going through.”

  I nodded my head. “Thank you for sharing your story. I’m sure that it was more than difficult to do so. And….” I couldn’t finish that sentence. I still couldn’t face that there was something, lurking in the distance, that was going to absolutely floor me. Stab me in the heart, more than I ever thought possible.

  We hugged, and went on our way, with promises to meet for lunch or dinner at least once a month, if not more.

  And I headed home. I tried, very hard, to muster the courage to go to my mom’s house. That, too, was where I knew the answer was. The real answer.

  But, before I could get up that courage, I got a phone call.

  “CJ,” an unfamiliar voice said to me on the phone.

  “Yes?” I said.

  “It’s Marisa,” she said. “Thank God you’re okay. Asher told me that you were in the hospital after you got into an accident, and I’ve been praying for you ever since.”

  “I’m so sorry, but what did you say your name was?”

  “Marisa,” she said. “Oh. Asher said that you might have memory problems. I’m sorry, I probably shouldn’t have called you, but I wanted to hear your voice and make sure that you made it out alright.”

  “Out of where?”

  She was silent. “I shouldn’t have called.”

  “No,” I said. For some reason, I wanted this particular answer. This would hold the key to where I was when I was in that accident. That was another piece of the puzzle that nobody, thus far, had been willing to tell me. “What did you mean by making it out alright?”

  More silence. Then, after what seemed like an eternity, she finally spoke. “You and I were held hostage. Falsely imprisoned, my lawyer said to me, by this guy named Yuri.”

  “Who was this Yuri?”

  More silence. “He wanted us because he was selling us. He was some kind of a human trafficker. I think that he bought girls from men who would abduct them.”

  Yuri? Yuri? That was a Russian name if ever I heard one.

  My breath started coming, faster and faster. Was this Yuri associated with Asher? Was Asher lying to me about being only a legitimate businessman? Perhaps he was trying to lure me into some kind of a slave arrangement with this Yuri guy.

  My head hurt. Asher seemed like the most normal, generous, sweet guy in the entire world. His attentiveness in bed made me forget that there was a world around me. He genuinely seemed to care for me.

  But maybe it was all an act. It was too coincidental, really, that some Russian guy named Yuri would abduct me. Or buy me. Whatever happened. Yuri, at any rate, held me captive, according to this Marisa.

  I felt sick to my stomach. “Tell me more,” I said.

  “Asher came to save me,” she said. “But he couldn’t save you, because you were already sold to somebody else.”

  How convenient.

  My heart was even more in my throat than ever. This entire thing was getting more and more crazy. I was with a human trafficker? Was I in an accident because this human trafficker tried to transport me, drove a little crazy, and plowed into that semi? And what role did Asher play in all of this? Was this person one of the ones that he was talking about, when he said that there were men out there who would get to the person that he marries?

  I wasn’t married to him, so why would this person even care about me at all?

  Maybe it was all just a coincidence.

  But I always learned that, in life, there really were no coincidences.

  “Tell me more,” I said to Marisa. “How did I end up with this Yuri person?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “I believe that Yuri bought you from somebody else. Another gang that kidnapped you off the street when you were working with some homeless people. At least, that was what Asher had explained to me about it.”

  “Who were the people who actually abducted me? How did I manage to get out of all of this?”

  “I’m only giving you second-hand information,” she said. “But, from what I understood, you were sold to this guy named Robert. He owned an escort strip club combination that was underground and illegal. You were being transported to the hospital for some reason. That’s unclear right now. But you were en route to the hospital when the limo you were driving in ran headlong into a jackknifed semi. You hit the windshield, which was why you ended up with head injuries and an induced coma.”

  “Did Asher tell you all of this?”

  “Nikolai did.”

  “Who is Nikolai?”

  “He’s a cohort of Asher’s from the old country. Asher contacted him to use him as backup when he found out that you were missing. Apparently, Asher feels that he’s rusty in some areas, and wanted to have somebody who was experienced in the mob world. In today’s mob world, anyhow.”

  My head started to hurt. I didn’t know what to believe. On the one hand, getting abducted by people in the mob, any mob, was too coincidental for me to believe that it didn’t have something to do with Asher. On the other hand, it sounded like Asher at least attempted to save me. So, perhaps he was innocent of any kind of wrong-doing in this whole messy affair.

  But why did he not tell me about any of this? He led me to believe that he didn’t necessarily know what had happened to me, or why.

  And why would he be behind any of it, anyhow? Was he making me a sacrificial lamb for him? He said that there were men who wanted him, whatever that meant, because of the things that he did when he was over in Russia. But that they would never hurt him. Would never touch him, because of his father.

  Might he have said “you can’t have me, but I’ll give you CJ?” And then, what, he had a change of heart and decided to do something to rescue me?

  I realized that I didn’t really know the first thing about Asher. Scarlett told me that he was a good guy, even though she admitted to me that he did lie to me about his past, and he had broken up with me because he wanted to protect me. She told me that he had broken my heart, essentially, and that I was devastated beyond measure by his rejection. Yet, there he was by my bedside, saying the words that I wanted to hear. That he loved me, and never stopped loving me, and he was sorry for the things that he did. Things that I had forgotten.

  He sugar-coated everything, that was for sure. Maybe he had laid a trap, whereby I was the bait, and he told these men that they could have me to sell, if they agreed not to touch him. He said that his father protected him, but maybe his father wasn’t so powerful anymore. Maybe something happened to where these men weren’t afraid of his father anymore, and they were going to come after him anyhow. When he found this out, he handed me over on a silver platter.

  Then he decided that he wanted me back, after all, and negotiated a deal to get me back. Of course, that was bullshit, because if he was responsible, in any way, shape, or form, with me getting abducted, he was immediately off my list of guys I wanted or needed in my life. As much as I was falling for him, already, that would be an absolute deal-breaker.

  Was my imagination running away from me?

  It wasn’t. I knew it wasn’t. The reason why I knew that my imagination wasn’t running away from me was because Asher was clearly hiding major things from me. This whole abduction was something that he never told me. And the other thing, the devastating thing that I didn’t want to know about – he was hiding that from me, too. Granted, I didn’t try to pry it from him, but he certainly didn’t bring it up, either.

  All at once, this man who I had the most magnifice
nt weekend with, ever, was somebody shady to me. Somebody who couldn’t be trusted.

  “CJ, are you still there?” Marisa asked me.

  “Yes, yes, I’m still here. Now, tell me what you know about the original people who abducted me off the street. Who were they?”

  “From what I can gather, according to Nikolai, they were Albanian gangsters. They were a part of the Bardha clan, whatever that means. I guess that’s a family that specializes in abducting young women off the street to traffic to other countries. This Yuri person saved you from being transferred to some of the wealthy men who buy these women to serve as sex slaves overseas.”

  Okay. So, maybe this whole thing wasn’t as nefarious as it all seemed. But, then again, it wasn’t like this Yuri guy just gave me up to Asher. He refused, in fact, because I apparently belonged to some other guy.

  So, the abduction was a coincidence, but Asher owed Yuri something, so he allowed Yuri to buy and sell me to somebody? Or these Albanians were perhaps the original people who Asher was dealing with?

  I didn’t know. I just had a feeling that this Asher was behind all of that happening to me. He did save me, but maybe that was all a part of the chain of events, anyhow.

  “Marisa,” I said. “Thanks for calling me. I appreciate somebody telling me something about what happened to me in that limo. If you don’t mind, I have to get off the phone right now. I have to do some thinking about everything.”

  “Oh, sure,” she said. “Would you please keep in touch, though, CJ? I’ve been so worried about you.”

  “Sure,” I said absent-mindedly. “I have your phone number, since you called me. I’ll just add your number to my contacts, and I’ll be sure to call you from time to time to tell you how I’m doing.”