Was she right?
Was Quest a coping mechanism dressed up as a man? Was the safety I felt with him real or was it my traumatized body grabbing onto the first person who wasn’t hurting me and calling it love? Was I falling for him because of who he was, or because of who he wasn’t—not my father, not Ahmad, not Thad? I could not let myself get hurt again.
I thought about the roller rink and the way he’d picked me up every time I fell. I thought about the hallway and the way he didn’t kiss me when we both wanted him to. I thought about the couch and the way he’d said “I got you” and meant it with his whole body. I thought about his text this morning—Same—one word that had made me smile for ten minutes straight.
And then I thought about Janelle’s words.The most dangerous relationships are the ones that feel like healing before you’ve actually healed.
I started the car and drove home and I didn’t text Quest back when he sent me a message asking about dinner. I just stared at his name on my screen and felt the doubt settle into my bones like a cold I couldn’t shake.
Maybe she was right. Maybe I wasn’t ready.
Or maybe she was wrong and I was letting a therapist talk me out of the one good thing that had happened to me in years.
I didn’t know which one scared me more.
28
SERENITY
Mega leaned against the bathroom doorframe with his arms crossed and watched me apply concealer under my right eye. The bruise had faded from deep purple to a dark brownish stain over the past few days but it was still visible if you looked close enough, and my mother always looked close enough.
“You can still see it,” he said, tilting his head like he was studying a problem he needed to solve before I left the house. “Use more. Blend it out toward the temple.”
I dabbed more Fenty 385 under my eye and blended the way he’d suggested because he’d gotten good at directing this process, which was something I tried not to think about too hard because what it meant was that he’d had enough practice to develop opinions on my concealer technique.
“There,” he said, nodding when he was satisfied. “Can’t see shit. You good.”
“Thanks, baby.”
He kissed my forehead and walked out of the bathroom and I stood there looking at myself in the mirror for a long time. The concealer was flawless. My man had just coached me through covering the bruise he gave me and kissed me on the forehead like we were a normal couple getting ready for a normal day.
I finished getting dressed. I put on fitted jeans, a black tank top with a Hermes scarf tied around my neck that covered the bruises on my neck, gold hoops, and the Cartier love bracelet that I hadn’t taken off since he gave it to me.
I drove to the correctional facility with the radio off because I needed silence to prepare myself for the performance of being Vivica Banks’s daughter in a room with guards and cameras.
The facility was about forty minutes outside the city. The drive gave me too much time to think and not enough time to stop thinking. My mother had been here for almost a year now, awaiting trial for India Coleman’s murder. A murder that didn’t happen, the victim a woman who was alive and well in Cambodia while my mother rotted in a cell paying for a crime my brothers had engineered.
I knew the truth. I’d pieced it together months ago because I wasn’t as stupid as my brothers thought I was. Prime, Quest, and Justice had framed their own mother. Set her up, planted evidence, made sure she’d never see freedom again. And I understood why—Vivica had gone after Zainab, had tried to destroy Prime’s family, had spent decades manipulating everyone around her. She earned what she got.
But she was still my mother. And I was the only one who visited.
The visitation room was cold and gray with plastic chairs bolted to the floor and a vending machine in the corner that only took exact change. I sat down and waited. A few minutes later the door on the other side opened and Vivica walked in wearing her orange jumpsuit with more dignity than most people wore a ball gown.
She looked older. Not dramatically, but enough. The lines around her eyes were deeper and her hair, which had always been impeccable, was pulled back in a simple bun that she probably hated. She had way more gray than I remembered. Buther posture was still perfect and her chin was still elevated and her eyes still swept the room when she entered like she was assessing which peasants were worth acknowledging.
That was my mother. Locked up and still looking down on people.
“Baby girl.” She sat across from me and reached for my hands. I let her take them. “You look beautiful. Is that new?”
“The scarf? No, I’ve had it.”
“It looks good on you. You’ve lost weight though. Are you eating?”
“I’m fine, Mama.”
“You always say that.” She squeezed my hands and looked at me with an expression that, in another context, from another woman, might have been genuine maternal concern. With Vivica, I was never sure. Love and strategy lived in the same house with her and they shared a bedroom. “Thank you for coming. You’re the only one of my children who visits me. The only one.”
“I know.”
