“How can you forgive him and the shit he did but not me?”
“What?” I laughed and sat up. “Forgive who?”
“Tulane.”
“Who the hell said I forgave Tulane for anything?” I questioned him, slightly confused. “I don’t forgive him for shit.I’m just not in the mood to keep fighting with him. I have the same mindset as I have with you. You did what you did. You’re going to do what you want, no matter what. I’ve accepted that, not forgiven it.”
“You hate me, Sunshine?” he asked. “Huh, you hate me that bad for trying to protect you?”
“I hate that you didn’t trust me enough to let you protect me.” I wiped my hands over my face and sighed. “I hate that we had this friendship that was supposed to be built on love and communication, yet we skirted around something so fucking big that it altered our lives. Amethyst, for eight years, we carried a secret. Not just you, but me too. I thought marrying Grant would save your life. You worked for the same family, thinking you were protecting me. In a perfect world, there would never have been a secret. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have raced, I wouldn’t have killed Xavier.”
“You didn’t kill her,” he said, shaking his head. No matter how many times I heard him say it my mind couldn’t grasp his words. My life changed in that moment, in that instant everything that I had planned went down the drain.
“My car hit hers--”
“According to Shelly,” he cut me off.
“Who the hell is Shelly?”
“Grant’s baby mama,” he replied, watching me. “Grant had four kids.”
“Three girls and a boy,” I said, nodding. “I know. I had the unpleasant pleasure of meeting his daughters at his funeral.” There was a brief moment of silence as I thought about Grant’s daughters. I wondered if Quincy had made good on his promise about putting them up for adoption, and where his son was. “Amethyst--”
“Quincy still has his girls,” he answered, already knowing the question before I asked. “His son is with a church member of the DeCortes.”
“How do you know?”
“Psalms cut him out of his mama’s stomach,” he answered. I waited for him to elaborate and was glad when he didn’t. “If you want the details, I can give them to you, but I don’t think you want to know.”
“I don’t,” I said, shaking my head. “I just want to sleep.” His eyes got big with surprise. “Alone. I want to sleep in this room. Alone.”
“Alright.” He stood, picked up the bowl, and stared down at me. “I’m sorry for everything. I don’t think I ever told you that, and you actually understood what I was apologizing for.” He gave me a lopsided smile that made my heart slam against my chest. Even after all this time, all he had to do was smile at me, and I was ready to forgive him. But I knew that I couldn’t. Not after the way he’d pushed me away. I had six months of learning to love him from a distance, and my being back didn’t change anything. “I wasn’t just apologizing for writing my name in your pussy and putting my daughter in your stomach. I was telling you, sorry for not saying what I wasn’t prepared to happen, even though it happened anyway.” He kissed my head and walked to the door.
“The only way I knew how to protect you was to send you away. It sounds dumb now, and I get that you hate me for deciding for you, but understand I did it because I needed you to be safe. I thought I couldn’t protect you and go after Quincy, so I sent you to the person whom I thought could give you peace and a sense of family. You always told me you wished you’d grown up with siblings and a dad like I did. Tulane did five things right, and that was you and your sisters. I didn’t know he was involved in all this. If I had, I would never have sent you to him. I wantedto give you that sense of family while I handled this shit with Quincy. I thought it would take me a few days or a week, maybe two weeks, not six months. I listened to every voicemail. The ones you cried over, laughed at, and cussed me out. I listened, Sunshine, I heard everything you said.” He turned the lights off and opened the door. “My mama always said don’t speak shit into existence, so I didn’t, but I guess even speaking my apology out loud gave the bad shit an opportunity it needed anyway.”
**
I woke up the next morning with a fresh bowl of grapes on the end table. They were still cold and slightly damp. I pushed the covers away and stretched, preparing to deal with the bullshit that came with today. After I did everything I needed to do in the bathroom, I grabbed the bowl of grapes and made my way downstairs. The house was quiet, but that didn’t mean it was empty. More than likely, my sisters were working, and Tulane was still asleep.
“I left the grapes for you to eat in case the food wasn’t done by the time you woke up,” Amethyst said when I walked into the kitchen. He was standing next to the stove, holding his phone in one hand and a bowl of what looked like eggs in the other.
“I only eat fruit at night,” I said, putting the bowl in the fridge. “What are you doing?”
“Cooking y’all breakfast,” he answered, then set his phone down. Because I was nosy, I couldn’t help but look at the screen, but it went dark before I could see anything. “Why are you up so early?”
“I’m always up early,” I said as I sat at the island. “What time did you get here?”
“I never left.”
His attention was on the eggs he was cooking, not me. If he’d been paying attention to me, he would have seen my face twist in confusion.
“Amethyst,” I sighed and rubbed between my eyes. “I asked you to leave last night.”
“No, you didn’t,” he said, shaking his head. “You said you wanted to go to sleep alone. So I left your room and slept in my office.” He looked over his shoulder and smirked. “You were alone.”
“You have cameras in your bedroom,” I countered, and he shrugged.
“Doesn’t negate the fact that I wasn’t physically in the room with you,” he said, then turned back to cooking. “Anyway, you know you toss and turn all night?”
