Chapter 9
Sister Odalys’s shelter itself underwent its own significant transformation in the years following the scandal that had nearly destroyed it. Stripped of its compromised funding source and facing genuine closure once the truth of Adrienne Vasquez’s donation came to light, the facility survived only through an emergency restructuring that folded its remaining operations into the county’s official child welfare system — a bittersweet outcome, Odalys often reflected, since it meant the facility finally received the legitimate, well-regulated funding it should have had from the beginning, precisely because its illegitimate funding had finally been exposed and cut off entirely.
“Forty children didn’t have to scatter after all,” Odalys told Wren once, several years into their complicated, ongoing reconciliation. “Not because my calculation was ever right, but because the truth, once it finally surfaced, brought exactly the kind of proper attention and legitimate funding that should have been there from the start. I spent seven years believing I was the only thing standing between those children and disaster. It turns out the disaster I was so afraid of was considerably more avoidable than my seven years of silence ever gave the system credit for being capable of.”
“You couldn’t have known that at the time,” Wren said.
“No,” Odalys agreed. “But I could have tried harder to find out, rather than simply accepting the quietest, easiest answer available to me. That’s the part I still can’t fully forgive myself for. Not the fear itself — fear for forty children’s welfare was reasonable enough, in the moment. But the speed with which I accepted the easiest possible resolution to that fear, without ever properly testing whether a harder, more honest path might have protected everyone involved considerably better.”
Anton Voss received his sentence on a bright morning in early autumn, nine years reduced considerably in recognition of his full cooperation, a sentence his own lawyer had wanted to appeal further and Anton himself had refused to allow. Nothing in the court’s judgment mentioned the dog he had shielded with his own body, because courts, as a rule, do not pass judgment on things like that. But Wren carried it with her regardless, understanding it as the one true measure of the man beneath everything else he’d done and failed to do across a decade of careful moral blindness.
The day before he was transferred to serve the remainder of his sentence, Wren visited him one last time, sitting in the plastic chair on her side of the visitation glass, bringing nothing with her but a question she’d been carrying for weeks.
“You shut down a dog fighting operation,” she said. “That was good. But you also moved containers for these people, year after year, and never once asked what was inside them. Why.”
Anton considered the question with the same steady, unhurried honesty that had characterized every word of his confession. “Because I didn’t want to know,” he said. “Because knowing would have required me to either act on it or live with knowing I hadn’t, and I’d already decided, a long time before any of this, that not knowing was easier than either option. I understand now that the not-knowing was its own choice, just as much as acting would have been. I don’t have any excuse better than that to offer you, and I don’t think one exists.”
“What made you finally start asking,” Wren asked.
“A dog that couldn’t ask for itself,” Anton said. “And a little girl’s name I’d been carrying so long I’d nearly worn the paper through. Somewhere along the way, not asking anymore became harder than asking would have been. I wish it hadn’t taken me a decade and part of a finger to get there. But I got there eventually, and I intend to spend whatever years I have left making sure the getting there actually meant something.”
Before he left, standing at the glass with his palm pressed flat against it in the universal gesture prisoners and visitors use in place of a handshake, he made Wren a single promise, delivered in one plain sentence with no embellishment. Each time his cooperation with investigators succeeded in shutting down another illegal fighting operation somewhere in the state — and his knowledge of Vasquez’s network proved, in the months that followed, considerably more extensive than anyone had initially realized — he would send her a single sealed envelope containing nothing but a paw print, inked and pressed onto plain paper, no names, no addresses, nothing any prison censor could object to passing through, one animal accounted for every month his continuing cooperation managed to save.
The envelopes began arriving within two months, and they never fully stopped.
