Track Pregnancy
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.
