“Wait a second, but aren’t you a border patrol guard? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be guarding against?”

“Yes,” he said again.

“Then why in the world would you be suggesting this? If this has something to do with the reason that you put me in these pajamas, then you should know that I am very much already taken, and if you so much as lay one hand on me, I can assure you that Michael will—”

“Relax,” Trevor laughed. “I don’t want to lay even so much as a finger on you.”

“You don’t?”

“No,” he chuckled some more. “I’m gay. And I stole those pajamas from the last hotel I stayed at. They looked soft and I thought they would make a nice gift for my sister. But you definitely looked like you needed them more than she did.”

“Thank you,” I said, not sure what else would be appropriate to say in that moment.

Trevor sat down across from me after refilling his coffee, and began to eat his breakfast. I was beyond hungry, so I picked up my fork and shoveled some eggs into my mouth, along with a crunchy corner of toast. I was feeling a little bit more hopeful this Morning, now that it seemed that there might be a way for me to still get the guys across the border.

“So,” I said through a mouthful of food.

I hadn’t realized how ravenously hungry I was until I began eating. “How do we do it? How do we get them across?”

I figured that since he was a border patrol guard that he must have known some of the tricks and secrets, and secret pathways.

“It’s not so much how to get your friends across that’s the problem,” he said as he sipped his coffee.

“Then what is?”

“It’s letting them know where to cross. You’d have to get into contact with them somehow, and from what Frank told me, you guys all left your phones and wallets behind.”

He was right, we did. The guys had taken off into the woods with absolutely no way to contact them or know where they would be going.

“Maybe you can contact Frank and ask him to help locate them,” I said.

“Nope,” Trevor said as he shook his head.

“Why not?”

“Frank is dead.”

I guess that answered the question of who fired the shots at the border last night.

“Then just let me back through the gate and I will go find them. I can bring them back to the gate and this time you can let us through.”

“I can’t do that,” he said as he finished his eggs. “I promised Frank that I would keep you here so that you would be out of danger in America.”

“But you just said that Frank is dead, so what does it even matter anymore?”

“A promise is a promise. I won’t undo what I promised to do just because he’s dead.”

Wow, this guy was super frustrating, and he had a super strange moral code of some sort.

“Okay, so you won’t help me go back across the border and there’s no way to get in touch with Michael or the others to let them know that there’s some secret entry point for them to get across. How exactly are they supposed to be able to get here then?”

“I don’t know,” he said without looking up from his plate.

I slammed my fist down against the table and sent his coffee spiraling crazily in his mug. Trevor looked up at me in surprise.

“I’m trying to help you, you know,” he said as he picked up the cup to settle the liquid inside and hold it to his lips.

“Then help me find a way to get them here,” I said without apology.

“I’m working on it.”

After breakfast, I promised Trevor that I would stay at his place without leaving while he worked his next shift, in exchange for him bringing home something that he said would be a “solution” to the problem of reaching the guys and getting them here to Canada. When he left, there wasn’t much for me to do except bathe and try to find some clean clothes that I could fit into and wear. Since all of our stuff had been stolen in the car, and since the whole debacle at the border didn’t go as planned, I had been in the same outfit for a while and didn’t really feel like putting it back on after having been in these cozy and clean pajamas.

As I was digging around in dresser drawers for something to wear, I remembered the backpack that Frank had given me when we had gotten in his truck to drive to the border. Now it all made perfect sense why there had only been one backpack. He had only ever intended for me to make it across.

I searched around a bit and found the backpack sitting on a chair in the living room. I didn’t figure that there would be any clothes in there, but I was still interested to see what was in the backpack. When I unzipped it, I found a stack of Canadian bills, some maps, a prepaid cell phone, and a picture of my mother. It looked like it had been taken at the seafood restaurant a long time ago. We were all sitting at the table—me, my mother, and father. I was so little that I barely remembered it. My mother looked beautiful, as always. It looked like the kind of picture that restaurant staff took of patrons enjoying meals so that they could hang them on the walls of the restaurant. I tossed the bag back down and resumed my search for clothes. I managed to find a few things to make do and put together a rather comfortable looking outfit that resembled the hip boyfriend jeans and French-tucked T-shirt style that was so popular on college campuses back in Charlotte. Thinking about Charlotte made me think about the guys, which made me start to worry about the many things that could have happened to them. I went to reach for the cell phone in the backpack, but as I held it in my hands, I realized that I didn’t have anyone to call that could help. By the time Trevor’s shift had finished and the door opened as he came home from work, I had been pacing around the house with the cell phone in my hand as I imagined how horrible and empty my life would be without Michael.

I was just about to rush over to the door and interrogate him about what kind of solution he had, since he had promised to bring one home with him after work, when I saw another man step in through the doorway behind him. From the way that the two of them were standing so closely together, I put together that this was probably Trevor’s boyfriend.

“Lisette,” Trevor said. “This is Eric, and he’s agreed to be the solution to your problem.”

Apparently, Eric knew people that lived in the woods on the American side of the border. He also happened to be Trevor’s boyfriend, so he was more than willing to lend a hand.

When the three of us got to one of the hidden illegal paths that led across the border, Eric crossed over into the states to try and find Michael and the others.

“I want to go,” I said.

“No, it’s far too dangerous for you. Eric knows where he’s going and if your boyfriends are there, he will find them.”

“They’re not my boyfriends,” I said, offended that he had even referred to them in such a menial way. Michael was my everything. There were no words to describe it.

“How long will he be gone?” I asked.

Trevor shrugged his shoulders.

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On what kind of trouble he runs into.”

The pathway was so overgrown that Eric had to almost crawl through it, which was why he wore jeans with reinforced knees to get across the rubble. There was literally no way that anyone would ever know that this hidden entry point existed, unless they had previous knowledge of it like Trevor did. He sat down on the ground near the entrance to the brush and waited.

“Are we just going to sit here and wait?” I asked.

“Yeah, why not? No one will find us here and even if someone happened to randomly pass by in this remote part of the border, they wouldn’t be able to see us above all the thick overgrowth. I’d prefer to wait here for Eric.”