“I been coming here every year for fourteen years. You ain’t never been here. Not once.”
“Maybe we just miss each other.” She took a step closer. “I come too. Every year. I just come at a different time because I know you don’t want to see me. But today I…” She trailed off, her eyes glassy. “I wanted to see you. I needed to.”
“Well you’ve seen me. You can go.”
“Quest, I loved him. You know I loved him.”
“Don’t.” I held up a hand. “Don’t stand in front of his grave and say that shit to me.”
“It’s the truth. And I have to live with what happened every single day of my life. You think you’re the only one who carries this?” Her voice cracked and she pressed her hand to her chest like the pain was physical. “I lost everything. I lost him and I lost you and I’ve been living with that for fourteen years.”
“You didn’t lose me, Pea. You destroyed us. There’s a difference and you know it.”
She flinched at that. Good. I wanted her to flinch. I wanted her to feel a fraction of what I’d been carrying for all these years.
“You can’t still be mad at me,” she whispered. “After all this time. You can’t still?—”
“Bitch, mad is an understatement.” I stepped closer to her and watched her eyes widen because she could see it on my face—that thing I kept locked behind everything else, the rage that didn’t have a bottom. “The only reason you’re still breathing is out of respect for your brother. That’s it. That is the only reason. And if you’re smart, you won’t test the limits of that respect by showing up here again.”
She reached for me. Both arms open, tears running down her face, reaching for a hug like fourteen years of damage could be fixed with an embrace. I caught her wrists before she couldmake contact and pushed her back with enough force that she stumbled. She caught herself, stared at me with those eyes that used to be my whole world, and for a second, I saw something flash across her face that wasn’t sadness or regret.
It was anger. Quick and hot, there and gone so fast that most people would’ve missed it. I didn’t miss it. I never missed anything when it came to Peanut, because missing things with her was how I ended up standing in this cemetery in the first place.
“Don’t ever touch me,” I said. “Don’t call me. Don’t show up where I am. We are nothing. We been nothing for fourteen years and that ain’t changing because you decided to cry at a cemetery.”
I turned my back on her and walked toward the parking lot. I could feel her eyes on me the whole way, but I didn’t look back because looking back at Peanut was how you got pulled into her gravity, and I’d rather chew glass than orbit that woman again.
I made it to the Maybach before it hit me. It always hit me after I left the cemetery, and it always came the same way. It was a memory I didn’t ask for, arriving without permission and playing behind my eyes like a movie I couldn’t pause.
Peanut sitting on the bathroom counter in my old apartment, holding a pregnancy test with both hands. Her smile so wide it changed the shape of her entire face. And me, standing in the doorway with my heart beating so fast I thought I was about to pass out because this woman—this beautiful, brilliant woman who I would’ve burned the world down for was telling me I was going to be a father.
I grabbed her off that counter and spun her around and she laughed into my neck and I remember thinking that this was it. This was the thing that was going to make everything else make sense. All the shit with Vivica, all the weight of the company, all the darkness I’d been wading through since I was eighteen,none of it mattered because I was about to be somebody’s dad. I was going to do it right. I was going to be everything my father didn’t get a chance to be and everything my mother failed at. This kid was going to know what it felt like to be loved without conditions.
My phone rang and yanked me out of it. I realized I was gripping the steering wheel with both hands and hadn’t started the car. My face was dry but my chest felt like somebody had reached inside and squeezed.
I looked at the screen. Mekhi.
“Talk to me,” I answered.
“Yo. I got something on the fire. You’re gonna wanna see this.”
“A lead?”
“Yep. I think it’ll get us to our guy.”
“Where are you?”
“The office. Come through.”
I started the engine. Pulled out of the cemetery lot without looking in the rearview because Peanut’s car was probably still parked back there and I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of seeing me check.
Quindon’s headstone got smaller in the distance as I raced out of there.
I merged onto the highway and drove toward Mekhi, toward answers, toward the next thing that needed handling. Because that was what I did. I buried the pain under work and I kept it moving, and if that wasn’t healthy, then I’d deal with that shit some other time.
Right now I had business to handle.
12
