And here I was, dropping the ball twice. It wasn’t that I couldn’t fight. I could always fight.
It was because I couldn’t aim, because my anger lost its discipline for a moment and splashed on the very person I was trying to keep dry. That wasn’t big dog behavior. That was fear wearing my face. And the part that haunted me most was the way my baby didn’t clap back. She didn’t cuss me out, didn’t embarrass me back. She just . . . folded inward for a second, like a flower closing at dusk, like her heart quietly decided to protect itself from me.
I’d never felt so powerful yet so wrong in the same breath. The irony was vicious. I was prepared to be her fortress, the manwho made the world act right, but the moment fear climbed my spine, I gave it the microphone and let it speak through me.
I took the heat meant for him and poured it onto her, the one person who didn’t deserve a single drop.
And when she wouldn’t stay after the station, something in me went quiet and cold. My body registered the loss before my pride could negotiate it, as if the air itself recognized that something sacred had shifted out of place.
I hated leaving her like that, but she wanted to go home and check on Nan. Though I respected it, every part of me wanted her close. I wanted her right where my eyes could keep count of my world. I didn’t fear much, but I did fear failing the people I loved. It was the fear that one blind spot could cost everything. I trailed her car like a shadow with a conscience, watched her pull in safe, kissed her, and left.
But that kiss didn’t taste like victory. It tasted like a prayer I wasn’t sure Heaven would answer. Her mouth was there, soft as ever, but her spirit had stepped back, and I felt it like cold air in a warm room. I felt the hollow where her trust usually rested. I felt the hairline fracture my tone had put in something sacred. You couldn’t be calling yourself big dog if your bark made your own woman flinch.
I told myself I’d give her time, not because I liked distance, but because I needed to honor it. I knew I had messed up badly, but I wasn’t about to let her shut me out, not in a controlling way, not in a you-owe-me-access way, but in a covenant way. In an ‘I found home, and I’m not abandoning the porch because I tripped on the steps’ kind of way. And it wasn’t about winning. It was about the fact that I had finally found the place my love was supposed to live, and I wasn’t letting misdirected fear serve me an eviction notice.
My baby didn’t even want to be in my house, and now my two baby girls moved through it like I’d broken the code. The truth was, I had.
Reagan’s silence was a sermon you felt in your ribs. Reece’s stare was a whole dissertation—footnotes and all—saying,you preach safety, then you humiliated her. Explain.
They didn’t need words. Their eyes said enough. And I deserved every bit of it.
I would fix it. I knew how cracks moved. If one was ignored, and it became a break, then you blinked, and what you swore you’d never lose was already on the floor.
I wasn’t letting the love of my life slip away because I couldn’t manage my own fear of losing someone I couldn’t protect.
My mind went where it always went when life started rattling—back to my parents’ loss, back to the hush after the funerals when the calls stopped. It went back to teenage me carrying grown-man weight in my ribs, fighting not to let grief become my whole personality.
The streets called for me too, sweet as sugar, acting like they could warm up abandonment. I had ties, not out of pride, but because I’d lived close enough to the edge to know who’d be posted there.
But I also had Elias and Ahmad. Elias didn’t do loud. He didconsistent. He taught me to think past my temper, move like choices had consequences, and build instead of react. He didn’t save me with speeches; he saved me with structure.
Ahmad was a different type of medicine. He’d roast you and reassure you in the same sentence with jokes on the front end, truth tucked in the back like a note you didn’t know you needed. He kept me laughing when grief tried to make me cruel, kept me from mistaking hardness for a personality. Elias and Ahmad weren’t just my people. They were my guardrails.
Those summers Elias’s people would come to Texas, I met his blood cousin, Jacory—Baton Rouge born, New Orleans raised—loyal, instinct-led, the kind of unhinged that felt safe.
He always had Chase with him too—New Orleans bred, wildcard best friend, and as overprotective as a pit bull. They took to me quick, grief-to-grief, because we all knew what it meant to miss somebody so badly that their name still echoed in quiet rooms.
We weren’t all blood, but we became family. And Jacory used to tell me, half joke, half prophecy: Protect your peace like it’s your passport; lose it, and you gon’ be fighting customs to get it back.
I didn’t grasp it back then. Now I understood it too well because I’d gambled my peace and hers over one moment, then made it worse by doing it in public, in front of her people and folks who didn’t deserve a front-row seat to her tenderness.
I treated her softness like it was negotiable, like her feelings were acceptable losses in my frustration, and that wasn’t Roman-coded. It wasn’t Coach DeLane. It was fear leaking out of my mouth and calling itself protection.
He put his hands on my woman, and yeah, that would get handled, but handled didn’t have to mean reckless. It could mean receipts—paper trails, charges, cameras, witness statements, a restraining order so tight it put his intentions in a cage. That was protection for Solè . . . me guarding her peace, not just her body.
And then there was the truth I hadn’t said, the part sitting on my conscience like a stone. At the station, Elias pulled me aside and told me others came forward—teachers . . . even students—about Henderson’s mouth and his obsession. I kept it from her because she already didn’t sleep enough, but that wasn’t protection. That was control wearing a caring face, and lovewasn’t supposed to manage you; love was supposed to partner with you.
That was why I snapped. I knew he was dangerous before she could afford to believe it. But I was dead wrong for how I did it, wrong for aiming my fear at her, wrong for embarrassing her, wrong for not trusting her with the truth.
I wasn’t making that mistake twice.
First, I had to check on my baby. I lifted my phone from the nightstand as if it weighed more than glass and metal, and I FaceTimed My Constellation until the last ring dissolved into nothing.
My chest didn’t drop because she missed the call; it dropped because silence could be a verdict. In that pause, I heard her retreating into herself, not out of spite, but out of self-preservation, measuring, with that careful intelligence of hers, whether my protection was still protection or just another version of harm wearing a familiar face.
So I took my keys and slid into the truck because absence would’ve been cowardice. I wasn’t going to let her sit alone with a wound I put there, especially when the world had already taken too much of her.
On the drive, I called Ahmad first.
