I nodded toward the armchair by the window. He ignored it and sat on the edge of my bed. I rolled my eyes. Typical. I perched at the other corner, robe wrapped tight around me like it could keep me safe.
He rubbed his palms over his thighs, thinking.
“Let’s start here,” he said. “Why you think I got a kid with Donique?”
I closed my eyes briefly. I was tired of feeling stupid, but I was more tired of sitting in lies.
“Because senior year, she kept trying to get you. Bitch hated me. And the night of the Christmas program, she told me y’all had fucked in August and showed me her belly. You show up here with a little girl about Aziza’s age, attached to you at the hip. I put two and two together and got… the wrong math.”
His jaw flexed. “I messed with her the summer before our senior year. That’s true. We were stupid and bored and everybody was fucking off. But once I clocked you? That was it. I’m not saying I was some saint, but there weren’t other girls while I was with you, Kyleigh. None,” he swore.
Something in me wanted to argue just on reflex. Old hurt didn’t die easy. I made an impatient sound.
“You expect me to just… take that? When I had screenshots of texts, timestamps, receipts. My parents did not play about that part.”
His brows pulled together. “What texts?”
“Messages between you and girls from school. Talking about how you were ‘good’ on me now, that you had options. It wasn’t just about Donique. There were others.”
Somehow, the hurt I’d felt then rolled out in my words now. He stared at me like I was speaking another language before shaking his head.
“That’s a lie, Kyleigh. A bold-faced lie. I was stuck on you. Waiting on you. The shit is low-key embarrassing. I tried to reach you all spring senior year. All summer after. First semester of college, I came home every weekend. Every weekend. I’d watch y’all’s house, hoping you came home,” he said, voice gravelly in its sincerity.
“When Aziza must’ve been three, four months old, your daddy came to me. Not me coming to him. Him coming to me.”
He stared straight ahead, voice flattening in that way it did when he was trying not to lose his temper.
“He found me outside walking Freedom’s Field. He walked up in his nice, silk shirt and told me how you had moved on with your life. How you were settling into university, enjoying your classes, making new friends. How you were happy. He said Mrs. Amanda told him I was still ‘sniffing around behind you’ like some stray dog.”
My stomach turned. The words were almost exactly what my father had said to me… flipped.
“He said, ‘If you really care about my daughter, you’ll stay away,’” Jabali went on. “Told me he and his wife had prayed about it and agreed it would be best if I left you alone so you could have a clean break. Then that nigga pulled out an envelope.”
He laughed once, bitter. “Thick envelope. I didn’t even touch it. I told him if he didn’t move it, I was going to break his face. Only reason I didn’t was out of respect for your grandmother. But I believed him about your being happy. I thought if you wanted me, you would’ve fought for me. So, I let it go before I did something that put me in jail. And I left.”
My head was spinning.
“That is not what he told me,” I said. My voice sounded far away, even to me.
“What did he tell you?”
I swallowed against the lump in my throat. “Right before Christmas, I told them I wanted to tell you. I was tired. I was lonely. I loved her so much, and the idea of you just out there not knowing… it ate at me. I told them I was going to call you after the holidays.”
I could see it so clearly, I almost felt like I’d slipped back into that old body. Sitting at the kitchen table in Houston, baby monitor on the counter, my parents sitting across from me like a board hearing my case.
“A week later, my father sat me down,” I said. “He told me he’d gone to talk to you. He said he wanted to ‘spare me embarrassment’ in case you rejected us.”
Jabali’s jaw clenched.
“He said you told him I was a sweet girl, but you’d moved on from your little high school fling. He said you told him youhad big plans and you weren’t trying to be tied down. That you were… ‘good on that Grindley girl,’” I forced out.
His eyes went dark in a way that scared me a little.
“He had a recording. He pressed play and I heard your voice. Saying just what he told me.”
He just stared at me.
“I believed him,” I whispered. “I believedyou.”
