Asking tough questions was like pulling teeth. If you did it too soon, it’d be bloody and raw. If you did it too late, you’d miss your opportunity. Lucky for us, there was no ambiguity this time. Cassie had asked for us herself. Whatever she had to say, she must have been dying to get it off her chest. She was already upright when we stepped into the room. Unlike the bland, white décor, Cassie was impossible to ignore. She stared at us in this frozen way, with empty, pleading eyes.

  “Were you waiting long?” I asked.

  She didn’t move, opting to continue staring at us like a newborn fawn. Perhaps she had already lost her nerve. The situation was delicate. I stepped forward and pulled the small toy from my pocket. Gabe stayed by the door.

  “I have something,” I said. “Does it look familiar?”

  I nudged the white rabbit toward her from the foot of the bed. The small, battered plush toppled over uselessly. Most of its dirty fur had worn away; even its eyes had given up the fight and fallen from their position.

  “How?” she asked.

  Her eyes lit up as she gently grasped it in her hands.

  “We found it lost in a pile of rubble while we were looking for you,” I said.

  She didn’t speak. Instead, she stared at the small toy and gingerly pressed it against her chest. With her disproportionately small size relative to her age, she looked incredibly vulnerable. Her features were more fit for a young girl than the fourteen-year-old teen she was. Looking at her made my protective instincts go into overdrive.

  “I had a feeling it was yours,” I whispered.

  She didn’t look up. I sat down on the edge and offered her phone to her as well.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know it won’t be much of a comfort.”

  She looked at it, but she didn’t reach out. After a moment of indecision, she slunk back into a collapsed posture like a wounded animal. She was a young fawn, and the high beams of a car were reflected in her eyes. I had a feeling it wouldn’t be a comfort, but I wanted to give her a chance. We could review the footage from her phone, but we didn’t have a camera in her head.

  “Do you want me to hold onto it for you?” I asked.

  No reaction.

  “I saw your videos. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?” I asked.

  Now that got her attention. She jerked and hid under her blanket.

  “You saw them?” she asked.

  I nodded.

  “It must have been hard,” I said. “You were very brave.”

  Slowly, she relaxed and pulled the blanket from her head.

  “My parents?” she asked.

  “They don’t know you’re here,” I said. “And they don’t need to see this either.”

  I raised the phone in my hand again as a peace offering. This time she took it.

  “My dad…” she whispered as her eyes darted to Gabe.

  Girls who grew up with violent and unstable fathers often developed complicated relationships with men. I couldn’t blame her for being suspicious of my partner. He saved our lives, but he also almost shot a woman in front of her. It was starting to look like the ten feet to the door wasn’t going to cut it.

  “He won’t hurt you,” I said. “Gabe’s a good guy.”

  It wasn’t just nerves. It was learned helplessness mixed with blurred lines. What was good or bad depended on your perspective, and whether someone was protecting you or holding you captive looked the same when you didn’t want to be saved. Shooting an assailant kept them from spilling more blood, but it still came at the cost of a life. How many lives would have to be lost to save her own? In her mind, there was already her father. With this woman too, that would bring it to two.

  “I’ll wait outside,” he said.

  Gabe knew that this wasn’t the time to push her, so instead of pleading with her to trust him, he simply pushed off from the doorframe and retreated back into the hallway outside. The minute he disappeared from view, Cassie could finally breathe.

  “Your father’s alive,” I said. “You didn’t kill him.”

  Shock gave way to relief, but there was still a sense of disbelief in her eyes. No truth could erase the time she spent hiding away and cursing herself for being a murderer. Even if you weren’t the one who pulled the trigger, you could still feel guilty in your heart. The first time I pulled the trigger, it was self-defense, cut and dry, and perfectly justified. That didn’t stop me from spending hours trying to wash the sin off my hands with the blood long gone and my skin dry enough to crack.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” I asked.

  She shook her head. We had the footage already. There was no reason to push her further. We’d get more information out of sending a team to canvas her family home.

  “You had something important to tell us, didn’t you?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “My sister...” she said.

  When she fled, she also left her little sister behind. Survivor’s guilt was brutal. The joy of escaping was marred by those we had to abandon. Of course, there was little a teen girl could do for herself, let alone her younger sister, but we often felt obligated to do what we could not on our own.

  “And my friend,” she whispered.

  Cassie was a loner. There was only one friend she could have been talking about, and the two of us had put her down only days ago. They say that being justified will ease your conscience. Self-defense, orders, and circumstance could all force your hand, but you were still the one that pulled the trigger. Sometimes what you knew and what you felt fell out of alignment, and you carried emotions that didn’t belong to you. Real life was never simple.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Do you mean White Rabbit?” I asked.

  She nodded again, wide-eyed.

  “On your phone,” I said. “I heard you call her that.”

  Maybe her drive to record and document all those painful moments hadn’t bubbled up to her consciousness yet. We often felt impulses we couldn’t control and poorly understood. I wasn’t one to talk. I didn’t have all the answers either. Deep down, we were all battling our own demons. The desperate yearning to be seen and known could still be at odds with the overwhelming fear of confronting the judgment of one of these hypothetical viewers. What if they didn’t understand? What if they hated you? What if it was all a waste of effort in the end?

  “I found her, and I fixed her so she could be my friend,” she said.

  “It must have been a lot of work,” I said. “Did you do it yourself?”

  She nodded sheepishly.

  “Is she okay?” she asked. “She stopped coming back. I was scared.”

  Gabe had the ability to put people at ease. Times like this made me wish I did too. I was always counting on someone else to soften the blow so I wouldn’t have to learn to pull my punches. Back during my school days, the one I leaned on was Lily. Once I grew up and put on my badge, I swapped her out for Gabe so I’d never have to learn how to do it myself.

  I always tore the bandaid off. It was the way I learned to do it too, but this time I wanted to do better. I wanted to tell her the way I should have been told hard truths at a young age. My family didn’t always know how to put things gently. My father meant well, but he was always short on time and too desensitized by the stuff he saw at work every day. My mother didn’t always understand how hard things would be on me. I was too sensitive, according to her.

  I still remembered the way my mother nonchalantly told me about a funeral for a distant relative. They were just a name, a photo, and a day trip to me. A complete stranger had passed away, and we were just paying our respects out of obligation. I’d never met them before, and their passing would have had no impact on my life whatsoever, but I still stared at their grave wondering if they would have loved me if we had ever met.

  “Sometimes the people we love hurt other people,” I said. “We had to make her stop.”

  I pulled down my sleeve to show her the handprint on my arm. The damage from shoving the vending machine and the falling rubble sent cracks through it, but there was no mistaking what it was. No one knew White Rabbit better than Cassie.

  “I’m sorry, Cassie,” I said. “I wish it could have been different too.”

  “Why?” she asked, tearfully.

  “Some bad people wanted to hurt her, and she hurt them worse,” I said. “We couldn’t let her go.”

  “It’s my fault,” she said. “She got hurt because of me.”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said. “Not this, not your father. Anything that she did, she did because she wanted to. You never made her do anything.”

  She jerked her head to look at me.

  “Listen to me. I want you to know it wasn’t your fault,” I said.

  “I just… I just wanted them to be proud of me,” she choked out between sobs.

  So that’s the story. A strange girl was born into a religious sect that forbade the one thing she loved the most. Unable to keep away, she dedicated herself to her craft. Eventually, she found a damaged android. It was peeking out of the rubble in a place for things thrown away, just like her. In it she saw an opportunity to prove her worth and ease her loneliness.

  Finally, it came time to show off her hard work, but she was not greeted with pride and understanding. Instead, her parents flew into a rage. Her hard work would be repaid with pain. She would never be good enough to make up for the disgust they felt. White Rabbit assaulted her father in order to defend her, its new and only friend. While blood pooled on the floor, her mother accused her of killing him. She took her mother’s shame and retreated to the one place her greatest mentor hid away all those years ago, back when he felt the shame of not being able to save his own mother. The rest spoke for itself.

  “Do I have to go back?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “You don’t.”

  She nodded.

  “And my sister?” she asked.

  “We’ll find a way for both of you to be safe,” I said.

  It was a promise I might not be able to keep, but there was a time and place for hope, and this was it. The odds weren’t always in our favor. Sometimes we had to dream. She deserved a chance to have a better life. I knew she deserved more because we all did. Always. It was by the nature of being born that we all deserved to be loved.

  I wasn’t expecting company, but there was a knock on the door. Imagine my surprise when Father Lewis walked through. He entered quietly. He wasn’t here as a priest today. He was a simple man in simple clothes, and I wasn’t the only one happy to see him; Cassie’s lit up immediately.

  “I’ll leave her in your capable hands then,” I said. “I’m just about to leave.”

  I wasn’t done, but I didn’t want to intrude. Together, they almost looked like family. It would have been nice to get to choose our parents the same way we did our friends. What would the world look like if we could redo every time we got a bad pull? For the two of them, they may get that chance, but my time as a father’s daughter was already over.

  “No, please stay,” he said. “Cassie has something she wants to say to you.”

  I wondered how he knew when she hadn’t said a word, but when you knew someone well enough, they didn’t always have to speak. Sometimes just a look or a gesture was good enough.

  “I didn’t tell you yet… The important thing…” she said.

  When she asked me about her sister, I assumed that was the important thing. I entirely overlooked that there could have been more. My head was too cluttered up with emotions. Some of them were mine. Some of them weren’t.

  “Take your time,” I said.

  My brother said that to me at our father’s funeral while we stood out in the pouring rain. It was so cold I could barely feel my hands. Back then, I couldn’t even cry.

  “Her name was Mercy,” she said, hesitantly.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “The one who came first,” she said. “Her name was Mercy.”

  There was only one person who beat us to her. Flashes of our altercation still crept into my nightmares. They were vague and ill-defined, just smoky silhouettes bathed in the dark. I was trying to take things one at a time, and in terms of priority, she had gotten buried alive. We hadn’t gotten word yet of anyone else who made it out of there. Just like my dreams, the real woman was hidden out of sight and out of mind.

  “Did she hurt you?” I asked.

  She shook her head.

  “She just cried a lot,” she said. “I thought she was a lot like me.”

  I thought she was only trying to stop Gabe from shooting her because she didn’t want more blood on her hands, but maybe there was more to it. Both of them were wounded spirits in their own way. Like attracts like. Seeing that broken woman made her feel less alone.

  “How long was she there?” I asked.

  Cassie shrank deeper into her blanket. I didn’t know she could look that small. Father Lewis put a hand on her shoulder and shook his head with the resignation of a man who knew when it was over. She wouldn’t talk anymore.

  Her bewildered eyes told me all I needed to know. I didn’t need her answer. From Cassie’s description, Mercy hadn’t spent long enough to have a clear delineator of time. From what Mercy had said herself, she found an opportunity and took it. There was no way she would have known we were going to be there until we were. Questioning Cassie further would be a waste of time. Mercy was a flitting visitor, just like us.

  “Thank you for telling me,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

  “I have?” she asked. “Helpful?”

  “You have,” I said. “You are.”

  And with that I strode right through those doors without looking back. This wasn’t her battle. She was still just a girl. It was time to let the big kids take over. In the end, we were all just pretending to be grown up.

  Out in the hallway, Gabe was waiting for me.

  “You told him she was here?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Thought she could use a friendly face.”

  “Nice touch,” I said.

  We all pitched in and made it count. I wasn’t a one-man team, and I should stop acting like it.

  “Did she talk?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Not much, but now we have a name.”

  I paused because it didn’t suit her. She didn’t deserve to dirty such a beautiful word. Had she chosen it herself, or was it given to her? Either way, there was some significance to it. After all, she told me she would make me remember her name.

  “Mercy,” I said.

  They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and if Mercy made it out alive, I knew she’d be all too happy to show us the hell of her own love.

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