Carefully, Uncle Gavin shakes his head, the tube in his mouth moving back and forth. I have a sudden, irrational urge to yank the tube out of his mouth, then rip the IV lines and the monitors and everything out of his body. I can’t do this. I can’t look at Uncle Gavin like this. I watched my father die in our house, lying on his back and gargling blood. I can’t watch Uncle Gavin die, too.

Uncle Gavin taps the whiteboard with his marker, trying to regain my attention. “Sorry,” I say, and I take a deep breath through my nose, then exhale through my mouth. “I’m sorry,” I say again.

My uncle keeps tapping the whiteboard. The dollar sign. He’s tapping the dollar sign that he drew. Money. It’s about the money, and Tane. Tane and the money. And then it hits me. I was so stupid, but now it’s as fucking obvious as a horse in a bathroom.

“Tane was their money man,” I say. “For the Sureños. He managed their money.”

Uncle Gavin nods, once.

“So why did the FBI have him? And why did you want to take him away from them?”

Uncle Gavin holds up the marker, then pauses. He waves it at the whiteboard. I realize there’s no space left for him to write. I take the whiteboard and wipe my hand across it, erasing it, and then I rub my palm on my leg. I hand the whiteboard back to him just as the door opens and the doctor and more medical staff enter the room.

“Give me a second,” I say to them, then I lean closer to my uncle and drop my voice to a whisper. “I lost him,” I say. “I lost Tane. He … the FBI came looking for him, and he ran away.”

Uncle Gavin’s dark eyes stay fixed on mine. I realize I’m crying and angrily brush the tears from my eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper, “but I’ll find him. I’ll find him.”

“We have to go, Miss Faulkner, Mr. Faulkner,” Dr. Lewis is saying.

“She’s almost done,” Ethan says.

Uncle Gavin finally takes his eyes off mine and looks at the whiteboard on his lap. He scrawls two lines on it. They both look like the signature of a drunk.

Dont trust FBI, the first line says.

The second line is: BCS13.