The fluorescent lights above me flickered, or maybe that was my vision. The phone suddenly weighed a thousand pounds in my hand.
Thad.
I was waiting until I got out of jail to deal with him, but now my sister was dating him. The memories of the day I was arrested at my grand opening flooded me. Justice had called out across the room—“Aye yo Thad”—and my whole world had tilted because I KNEW that face. I’d seen it before. In an alley. Standing over a body. In my nightmares, every single night for five years.
The man who killed Zahara.
The man who murdered my sister was DATING my other sister.
“Z? You still there?”
“What did you—” I tried to speak, tried to ask her to repeat herself, tried to make sense of what she’d just said. “Mehar, did you say?—”
A cramp hit me so hard I doubled over.
Not like the others. This one was different. Sharper. Deeper. Like something inside me was tearing itself apart.
“Z? Zainab, you okay?”
“I’m—” I gasped, one hand pressed to my belly, the other tightly gripping the phone. My mind was splitting in two—half of it screaming about Thad, about the danger Mehar was in, about the monster sharing her bed. The other half consumed by pain so intense I couldn’t breathe. “I’m fine, I just?—”
Another contraction. This one ripped a guttural scream out of me, echoing through the phone bank. Several women turned to look. Someone said something I couldn’t hear.
“ZAINAB! What’s happening?! Are you okay?!”
I wanted to answer her. Wanted to tell her to get away from Thad. Wanted to scream that the man she thought was keepingher safe was the same man who’d taken everything from us. Who’d killed our sister and left her body for me to find. Who was now in Mehar’s bed, in her life, probably watching her sleep and remembering that he got away with it.
But I couldn’t say any of it.
Because that’s when I felt it.
A rush of warmth between my legs. Soaking through the thin prison pants. Pooling on the floor beneath me.
My water.
My water just broke.
“No,” I whispered, staring down at the puddle spreading around my feet. “No, no, no. Not here. Not now. Please, God, not HERE?—”
The phone slipped from my fingers. I heard it clatter against the wall, heard Mehar’s panicked voice still calling my name through the receiver — “ZAINAB! ZAINAB WHAT’S WRONG?!”—but I couldn’t reach for it. Couldn’t do anything except grab the edge of the phone station and try not to collapse.
I’d heard what she said. Heard it loud and clear.
Thad. Prime’s cousin. You’ll love him.
But I couldn’t address it. Couldn’t warn her. Couldn’t do a damn thing except?—
“HELP!” someone shouted. “She’s having a baby! SOMEBODY HELP!”
But the COs who came running didn’t look concerned. They looked annoyed.
Cooper was the first one to reach me, his face twisted in irritation, like I’d personally ruined his night. “The hell’s going on here?”
“My water broke,” I gasped. “I need—I need a doctor?—”
“You need to get back to your cell is what you need.” He grabbed my arm, started pulling me away from the phone bank. “Come on. Let’s go.”
“I’M IN LABOR!”
