Her name is Rosa Pena. She is forty-one years old, and she is the third victim whose statement went to police in connection with Roy Clifton's debt collection operation.
The statement never made it to any formal file. Deborah found it through a legal aid organization that had represented Rosa briefly, and she has spent three weeks arranging this meeting through careful channels, making sure Rosa understands that she is not going to be named, that the meeting is background, that Deborah is trying to understand a system rather than expose a person.
They meet at a coffee shop in North Philadelphia on a Thursday morning. Rosa is a small woman with very direct eyes and the specific wariness of someone who has decided to be here and is still reconsidering it.
Deborah orders coffee. Rosa orders nothing. They sit.
"You found the statement," Rosa says.
"I found it."
"It didn't go anywhere."
"I know. I'm sorry."
Rosa looks at her. "Are you writing about him? Clifton?"
Deborah is careful. "I'm writing about how reports like yours end up disappearing. The systemic failure. Not about you specifically."
"He died," Rosa says.
"I know."
"Heart attack." She says it with a specific flatness. Not satisfaction — flatness. The tone of someone who is not sure what to feel and has decided not to feel anything in the interim. "I read it in the paper. Heart attack. He was forty-seven." A pause. "He was perfectly healthy."
Deborah does not respond to that. She waits.
"Do you know what I thought," Rosa says, "when I read that he was dead? I thought: good. And then I thought: I should feel worse about thinking that. And then I thought: no, I shouldn't." She wraps her hands around the edge of the table. "He hurt three people I know of. Probably more. And nothing happened to him. He just kept living."
"Until he didn't," Deborah says carefully.
"Until he didn't." A pause. "Are you sure it was a heart attack?"
They look at each other.
Deborah says: "What the medical examiner determined was a cardiac event."
Rosa nods slowly. "Right." She looks at the table. "Right."
Neither of them says anything else about it. They talk for another forty minutes — about the statement, about the legal aid system, about what Rosa tried and when she tried it and what happened to each attempt. It is a detailed and devastating account. Deborah writes everything.
When they leave, Rosa puts on her coat and she says, without looking at Deborah: "Whoever did it — if someone did it — I don't know how to feel about it. I've been trying to figure that out."
"Have you figured it out?"
Rosa buttons her coat. "I keep going back and forth," she says. "Some days one way. Some days the other." A pause. "Most days I just feel — relieved. And I know that's complicated."
"Yeah," Deborah says. "It is."
Rosa goes. Deborah sits with her coffee. She opens her notebook.
She writes: Relief. Relief is complicated.
Then she closes the notebook and looks out the window for a while.