would make everything more real, and she wasn’t sure she was ready for it to be that real yet.”
Denise arrived within fifteen minutes, and I watched her face cycle through the same shock and horror I
had experienced, examining the documents Ethan had spread carefully across my kitchen table once we’d moved the baby to the makeshift bassinet I’d assembled.
“This is genuinely enormous,” Denise said, flipping through pages of what appeared to be detailed financial records, dates, amounts, initials rather than full names in most entries, though several pages
included full names and photographs that left no ambiguity about who was actually involved.
“We need a lawyer before we go to the police,” Denise said. “Not to protect Richard, obviously, but to
protect Ethan and this baby, and to make sure whatever evidence we hand over is presented in a way that actually results in real consequences rather than getting tangled up in procedural complications.”
I appreciated her steady, practical thinking, understanding that my own mind was still too overwhelmed by shock and grief to think clearly about the practical steps actually required. Denise had always been
the more decisive of the two of us, even as children, and I remember feeling, in that moment, an overwhelming gratitude that she was still in my life, still someone I could call at midnight with a crisis this enormous and trust her to arrive without judgment.
Denise called a friend of hers, an attorney named Patricia Alvarez who specialized in exactly the kind of complex criminal matters this situation apparently represented, and Patricia agreed to meet us that same
evening, understanding, from Denise’s careful explanation over the phone, the urgency of the situation.
I want to describe that meeting with Patricia, because I think her calm, methodical guidance mattered enormously to how we eventually navigated the following days.
Patricia arrived close to ten that night, a compact, sharp-eyed woman in her fifties who moved through our chaotic kitchen with a kind of unhurried authority that immediately steadied the room. She spent
nearly an hour reading through the documents Ethan had brought, occasionally asking clarifying questions, occasionally photographing specific pages with her phone, her expression giving away almost
nothing until she finally sat back and folded her hands together on the table.
“I want to be direct with you,” Patricia told us, her expression carrying a gravity that confirmed everything
we already feared about the seriousness of what we were dealing with. “This appears to document a substantial, ongoing criminal enterprise, likely involving human trafficking charges, fraud, and potentially
charges related to illegal reproductive exploitation, depending on exactly how the surrogacy arrangements were structured and whether genuine informed consent was obtained from the women involved.”
“What about Priya,” I asked. “What about finding her, making sure she’s safe?”
“That needs to happen immediately,” Patricia said. “I’m going to call a detective I’ve worked with before who specializes in trafficking cases, someone I trust to move quickly and carefully. We need to report her
as a missing person connected to a documented criminal enterprise, which should trigger a considerably more urgent response than a standard missing person’s report would receive.”
“And Ethan,” Denise asked. “What about protecting him in all this? He’s the one who’s been holding onto this evidence.”
