The cheating continued. Got worse, actually, now that Zahara was focused on the baby and not on him. He stayed out later. Came home less. Treated his bedroom like a revolving door for whatever hood rat caught his attention that week.
And then he asked for a threesome.
I still remember the way he said it. Casual. Like he was asking us to pass the salt. “Y’all twins, right? Ever thought about… you know… sharing?”
Zahara’s face went pale. I saw the hurt flash across her features before she could hide it—the realization that the father of her child saw her as nothing more than a sexual opportunity. A fantasy to be fulfilled.
“No,” she said quietly.
“Hell no,” I said, not quietly at all.
He laughed it off. Played it like a joke. But he asked again a week later. And again the week after that. Each time more insistent. Each time less playful.
“Come on, Zai,” he said to me one night when Zahara was in the shower. Cornered me in the kitchen with that look in his eye. “I know you ain’t never had none. Let me break you in. Zahara don’t gotta know.”
I kneed him in the balls so hard he couldn’t walk straight for two days.
After that, I knew we had to go. But leaving meant being homeless again, this time with a newborn baby. Zahara wasn’t ready. Wasn’t strong enough yet, still recovering from childbirth, still breastfeeding, still believing somewhere deep down that Meech might change.
So I took matters into my own hands.
I knew Meech kept drugs in his car. He moved so messy, despite his ambitions of being a kingpin—something that was never going to happen. He was too arrogant to think he’d ever get caught, too comfortable in his little corner boy kingdom.
I called the tip line from a burner. Gave them his license plate number, his description, the times he usually made his runs. Anonymous. Untraceable.
They picked him up two days later with enough product to catch a trafficking charge.
Zahara was furious. Screamed at me for an hour straight, called me every name in the book, said I’d ruined everything, said Yusef needed his father.
“His father is trash,” I told her calmly, already packing our bags, stealing every hidden dollar in the house. “And we’re leaving. Tonight. We’re getting as far away from here as possible.”
She didn’t speak to me for three days.
By the time we got to California, she’d forgiven me. Mostly. Held my hand on the Greyhound bus and watched Yusef sleep in my arms and admitted, quietly, that she was relieved.
“I couldn’t do it,” she whispered. “I couldn’t leave him on my own. I needed you to make the choice for me.”
That was Zahara. Soft where I was hard. Gentle where I was sharp. She felt things too deeply, loved too easily, forgave too quickly. And I spent my whole life protecting her from a world that took advantage of people like that.
California was supposedto be our fresh start.
And for a while, it was. We found a tiny apartment in Inglewood—one bedroom that we shared, a kitchenette barely big enough to turn around in, a bathroom with a shower that only ran hot water for five minutes at a time. It was cramped and loud and the neighbors dealt drugs out of the apartment next door.
But it was ours.
The problem was money. We didn’t have GEDs—Baba had homeschooled us, which really meant he’d taught us enough Quran to recite and enough math to work the register at hishealth food store. No diplomas. No transcripts. No way to prove we’d ever been educated at all.
So we took what we could get. Waitressing jobs that paid under the table. Cleaning houses for rich white women in Beverly Hills who looked at us like we might steal their jewelry. Retail gigs during the holidays that disappeared come January.
We traded off shifts like a relay race, one of us always home with Yusef while the other hustled for rent money. Some months we made it. Some months we had to choose between electricity and groceries. Some months we ate ramen for two weeks straight and pretended it was a choice.
But we had each other. And we had Yusef. And we had our dream.
Sweet Zin.
We’d been baking together since we were kids, back when our family’s kitchen was still ours to use. We’d learned business basics in his health food store—inventory, pricing, customer service—and we’d taught ourselves the rest through library books and YouTube videos and trial and error.
Our cinnamon rolls were legendary. We’d make them on Sunday mornings when we had the money for ingredients, and the whole apartment building would smell like butter and cinnamon and brown sugar. If we had enough money to rent booths, we would sell at farmer’s markets or other local events. We’d sell out every single time.
