He studied my face. Kids are like human lie detectors, they don’t know the science behind it, but they can feel when grown folks are bullshitting them. Whatever he saw in my eyes must’ve passed the test because he nodded.
“Good. Because I learned a new joint on the piano and you gotta hear it. It’s Clair de Lune. The whole thing. No mistakes.”
That’s my boy. Well, Zahara’s boy. But mine too. In every way that mattered.
“Play it for me after dinner?”
His whole face changed. Lit up from the inside like somebody flipped a switch. “Deal!”
He took off toward the kitchen hollering about whatever Rita was making, and I stood in the foyer letting the house absorb me.
Garlic. Butter. Something sweet in the oven—Rita had been baking. That woman stayed in somebody’s kitchen. TV on low in the living room, some cartoon playing to nobody. And from upstairs, that soft white noise machine humming through the baby monitor.
I took the stairs quiet. Skipped the creaky one—third from the top, been meaning to fix that—and made my way down the hall.
Master bedroom door was cracked.
And there she was.
Zainab. In the rocking chair by the window. Kheris against her chest, nursing. The sunset was coming through the curtains all golden and warm, catching her headscarf, the line of her jaw, that spot on her shoulder where her robe had slipped.
I swear to God this woman looked like a whole Renaissance painting and didn’t even know it. Idris was knocked out in his bassinet. Fists balled up by his ears, mouth slightly open.
Zainab looked up and there it was. That smile. The one that started slow at the corners and spread across her whole face like daybreak.
Made my chest hurt every time. The good kind of hurt.
“Hey, stranger,” she whispered.
“Hey, Goddess.”
Three steps across the room. Kissed her forehead. Her nose. Her mouth, slow, soft, she tasted like that ginger tea she’d been drinking. She made this little sound against my lips. Mmm. Like I was something she’d been craving.
“How’d it go?” she asked. Eyes doing that thing where they searched my face. Looking for damage. For darkness. For whatever pieces of the old me I might’ve brought home with me.
“It’s done,” I said. “All of it.”
“All of it?”
“All of it.”
She went still. Reading me. Then I watched it happen in real time—the tension she’d been carrying for weeks, maybe months, just… left her body. Her jaw unclenched. Her shoulders dropped two inches. The grip she had on Kheris loosened into something gentle instead of desperate.
“It’s really over?” Barely a whisper.
“Really over.” I knelt beside the chair. One hand on her thigh, the other resting on Idris’s chest in the bassinet. His little heartbeat fluttering under my palm like a hummingbird. “No more enemies. No more looking over our shoulders. No more me leaving and you not knowing if I’m coming back. It’s just us now, Goddess. Just us.”
Her eyes filled up. Not sad. Not scared. Just… release. Like a dam breaking after holding back a river for too long.
“I been so scared, Prime.” Voice cracked right down the middle. “Every time you walked out that door, I’d just sit here and pray. Every time the phone rang my heart would stop. AndI never told you because you had enough on your plate and I didn’t want to add to it, but I was terrified. Every single day. Terrified that one day you wouldn’t come home.”
“I know, baby.” Wiped her tears with my thumb. “I know. But that’s done now. You hear me? On my life. On these babies. The war is over, and I’m home. For good.”
Kheris unlatched and pulled back, making that little satisfied grunt babies make when they’re milk-drunk. Zainab shifted her to her shoulder, patting her back real gentle, and our daughter’s eyes fluttered shut against her mama’s neck.
“You wanna hold her?”
I took my baby girl. Careful. Head supported. Settled her against my chest where she fit perfectly, this warm little weight right over my heart.
