They put the cuffs on Dominic with the kind of care that made me want to laugh and cry at once — gentle enough to be humane, firm enough to be final. Agent Reyes read him his rights the way a person reads a familiar passage, voice steady, eyes kind in a way that made the words mean something less like judgment and more like procedure. He didn’t resist. He never did when it mattered.
“Stay strong,” he mouthed to me just before the car door closed, and the sound of it hit like a stone I hadn’t seen coming.
I signed the paperwork that would place me under “protective custody,” an absurd phrase that sounded like velvet until it was reality: a federal agent’s car, an evidence locker in a courthouse basement, a small, windowless room with a cot and a kettle. Reyes told me gently that it was te
