My voice comes out smaller than I’d like, shaky and uncertain. “Marcus. I need help.”
The warmth in his voice instantly shifts to professional concern, sharp and focused. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
I don’t tell him everything. Not yet. Just the essentials. The slap. The smoking. The six months of slowly escalating financial exploitation. The fact that they’ve been taking four hundred dollars every month from my eleven-hundred-dollar disability check for “household expenses,” plus additional fees for utilities and groceries that mysteriously always add up to more than seems possible.
Marcus’s voice changes, becomes hard as steel. “Don’t move anything. Don’t delete any messages or throw away any receipts. Don’t argue with them, don’t threaten them, don’t warn them that you’re taking action. Just act like nothing has changed. Can you do that?”
“Yes,” I whisper.
“Good. I’m going to build a case. We’re going to document everything. And Loretta—I’m going to make this right. You saved my life once. Now it’s my turn.”
When I hang up, I stare at the phone for a long moment, my heart pounding. Then I make the second call.
Rhonda Washington answers on the first ring, her voice bright and familiar even after years of minimal contact. “Loretta Denison? Oh my God, I was just thinking about you last week.”
Rhonda grew up two doors down from me in a rough Columbus neighborhood where opportunities were scarce and escape seemed impossible. Her mother got sick with cancer when Rhonda was in college, and I stepped in without being asked. I fed her mother, bathed her, sat with her through the terrible nights when the pain was worst and the fear was overwhelming, read to her from the romance novels she loved. I did this so Rhonda could finish her degree, could chase her dream of journalism, could build the life her mother wanted for her.
Now Rhonda is an investigative journalist with the Columbus Dispatch, specializing in human interest stories and systemic failures that hurt vulnerable people.
I tell her what I need. She listens without interrupting, and when I finish, there’s a long pause.
“You’re sure you want to do this?” she asks quietly. “Once this story goes public, there’s no taking it back.”
“I’m sure,” I say, and I am. “I spent six months being invisible. I’m done being quiet.”
“Then I’m in,” Rhonda says. “I’ll bring a photographer. We need documentation. And Loretta—I’m going to make sure people understand what happened to you. The whole story, from the beginning.”
The third call is the hardest because Vincent Torres was like a second son to me, and this call feels like a betrayal of Deacon even though Deacon betrayed me first.
Vincent was Deacon’s college roommate, a skinny kid from a broken home who spent more time at my apartment than at his own during those four years. He ate my cooking, slept on my couch after late-night study sessions, called me “Mama Loretta” with a warmth that made my chest ache. When he graduated with a degree in accounting, I was there in the audience cheering as loud as I had for Deacon. He went on to become a forensic accountant who specialized in financial exploitation cases, tracking money that people tried to hide, uncovering fraud that victims didn’t even know was happening.
“Mama Loretta,” he breathes when he hears my voice. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach Deacon to get your number. I wanted to visit.”
“I’ve been here,” I say. “Living with Deacon and Sloan.”
