B O R D E R L I N EA Novel by Victor FernandezD E S C R I P T I O NThree girls. Seven days. Two fathers who were never supposed to come back. Friday night, 8:41. Sofia and Izzy Vega and their best friend Kayla Colton walk out the wrong door of a dying mall in Mesquite Wells, Texas, and into the back of a white van. By morning they are on a road south. By Sunday night they will be across the border. And at midnight on Friday, they will be sold.Marcus Vega is a small-town police sergeant who used to be something else, and has spent nine years making sure his family never had to see it. Ray Colton is a former Green Beret with a sealed pint of bourbon under his truck seat and a daughter who has quietly stopped asking whether he's okay. The chief of police says wait twenty-four hours. The FBI says wait for the warrants. So the two fathers pour nine bottles down a sink, take what's in the safe, and go south through a tunnel nobody is supposed to remember.But the girls aren't waiting to be rescued. In a barn behind a wall of broken glass, Sofia is building a map in her head: every guard, every shift change, every eight minutes the generator goes dark. Izzy takes the beatings so no one else has to. And Kayla, who draws hands the way other kids take selfies, is talking to a boy with a burn scar on his hand who might, if she asks him right, leave a door open.Then the deadline moves up a day. Border Line is a relentless, heart-first thriller about fathers and daughters, about what a man keeps locked away and what it costs to take it back out, and about the girls who count everything when the world has decided they don't count at all. Because getting out is only the first war. The second one is waiting at home.Content note: this novel deals with the tra?icking of teenage girls. The violence against them happens off the page.
