I turned my body to hide palming the baggie of pills. “Thanks for these.”

A little thrill moved through me as I looked at them. These tiny discs of white represented hope for Julia, and for me. I smiled.

Ben watched me. “Let me tell you something, Emma. Dealing isn’t a game. Nobody wins. It’s just survival. Do you understand that?”

“I think I understand that better than anybody right about now.”

Ben shook his head and shoved his door open, forcing me to step back. “I don’t think you do. You want to be included? Part of the plan? Then you need to know what’s really going on.”

He yanked the back door open. Five pairs of eyes blinked at the sudden light.

The girls were all young, in their late teens or early twenties, with hunched backs and terrified eyes that suggested they were used to hiding. The girl nearest the door was the youngest, maybe seventeen or eighteen. She had vitiligo, a condition in which the melanin in skin cells stops working, leaving the patient with patches of lighter skin. These stood out most prominently on her face and hands.

I wondered how they’d gotten here, to this van, in a Costco parking lot. What sort of pain and trauma had they faced?

A woman holding a baby looked up at me, the only one to hold my gaze. Her eyes glittered, chin jutting defiantly, like she was challenging me to ask why she was there. But I didn’t need to. I knew the lengths to which a mother would go.

“These girls are undocumented,” Ben said. “They have a fake ID to see the doctor. We give them fifty dollars for the prescription once it’s filled. They can’t complain because they know we can turn them in to ICE anytime. We exploit them and send them on their way. You okay with that?”

I thought about Josh sick at home. I thought about Julia writhing in pain as she waited for relief the medical system had denied her, and this woman in front of me just trying to earn enough money to provide for her baby.

My dad had once told me that the most dramatic moment of a game of Texas Hold’em is when the player pushes all their chips to the center of the table. That’s when they go all in, when they realize there’s no going back. That’s when they commit to either raking in the pot or losing everything.

“More harm is done by a timid doctor than a bold one,” he used to say. “Inaction is what kills people. Be bold and decisive, and never quit as long as you have a chip and a chair.”

I was all in. Josh’s life was worth just as much as each of theirs, every girl in that van and every person in this parking lot.