“Don’t do that.” Her voice was firm. “Don’t go blaming all women. Vivica is just one?—”
“It ain’t just Vivica, although that shit tops the fuckin’ cake.”
“I know about Camille.”
“Fuck Camille.” I shook my head. “My ex did something way worse.”
Mehar was quiet. Waiting. Not pushing but not retreating either. Just sitting there in the dark beside me the way she’d insisted on doing, letting me arrive at the words in my own time.
“I had a son,” I said. And the sentence came out like it weighed a thousand pounds because I hadn’t said it out loud to anyone new in fourteen years. “His name was Quindon.”
“I was twenty-four. I was there for every single appointment. Every ultrasound. Every midnight craving run. I painted his nursery blue. I bought a rocking chair from an antique shop in Georgetown because I wanted my son to have things that were built to last.” My voice was doing something I didn’t recognize. It was cracking in places, steadying in others, like the words had been stored behind a wall for so long that they were coming out misshapen. “I was in the delivery room when he was born. I cutthe cord. I held him before anyone else did. He was so small, Mehar. He fit in my two hands.”
She didn’t say anything. She was facing me now, turned in her seat, and in the dim light from the dashboard I could see that her eyes were wet but she wasn’t crying. She was holding it for me. Holding the emotion so I could keep talking.
“At seven months he got sick. Leukemia. They wanted to do a bone marrow transplant and I got tested because that’s what you do. You do whatever it takes.” I swallowed hard. “The results came back and the doctor sat me down alone and told me I wasn’t a match. And then he told me why I wasn’t a match.”
The silence in the car was absolute.
“I wasn’t his father. The blood work proved it. The baby I’d named and held and loved and fought for and sat up with at three in the morning while he screamed through chemo treatments wasn’t mine. Peanut had been with somebody else and she let me believe that boy was my son for seven months.”
“Oh my God,” Mehar whispered.
“I found out I wasn’t his father and that he was dying at the same time. In the same conversation. The doctor told me both things in the same sentence and I sat in that office and my whole world came apart at the seams.” I paused because the next part was the part I’d never told anyone. Not Prime. Not Justice. Not Rita. “But I didn’t leave. I stayed. Because even though he wasn’t my blood, I loved him. He was my son in every way that mattered. So I stayed in that hospital and I held him through the rest of the treatments and I paid for everything and I was there every single day until the end.”
“The end?”
“He died.” Two words. Fourteen years and those two words still felt like swallowing glass. “He was almost one. The chemo wasn’t working. His little body couldn’t take it. And I washolding him when he went. Holding a baby that wasn’t mine while his real father was somewhere out there living his life.”
Mehar’s hand found mine in the dark. She laced her fingers through mine and held on tight and didn’t say a word because there were no words for this. There was no therapy phrase or inspirational quote or comforting sentence that could touch the weight of what I’d just told her. She just held my hand and let me sit with it the way I’d held her on the couch after the first time and let her cry without asking why.
“I got a vasectomy six months later,” I said. “Swore I’d never have kids. Never let another woman that close. Started the poly relationship with Camille and Lyric because I figured if I spread myself across two people, neither one could get all the way in. And it worked. I kept everybody at arm’s length and I didn’t feel shit and I buried everything under work and money and sex and I told myself I was fine.”
“And then?”
“And then I met your mean ass.” I looked at her. “And I wasn’t fine anymore.”
She squeezed my hand. A tear rolled down her cheek and she wiped it away fast like she was mad at herself for letting it fall.
“I don’t know how to trust people, Mehar. I’ve been lied to by every woman I’ve ever cared about. My ex lied about Quindon. Camille lied about the pregnancy. Lyric lied about who she was. And now Vivica—my own mother—lied about who I am. My whole life is built on other people’s lies.”
“Not your whole life,” she said. “Rita didn’t lie to you. Your brothers didn’t lie to you. Mekhi and Zephyr didn’t lie to you.” She paused. “And I haven’t lied to you.”
That sat between us in the car and I let it sit because I wanted to believe it. I wanted to believe it so badly that the wanting itself scared me because wanting things was how you got hurt.
“I need to go see her,” I said.
“Vivica?”
“Yeah. I need to look her in the face and hear her say it. The letter isn’t enough. I need to hear the words come out of her mouth.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
We sat there at the overlook for a long time after that. The city kept glittering and the river kept flowing and somewhere in a prison forty minutes away, my mother was sitting in a cell knowing that her bomb had landed and probably smiling about it.
But she’d miscalculated. She thought the truth about Rashid would break me. Would make me question everything, the company, the legacy, my place in the family. Would fracture the bond between me and my brothers. Would burn down everything I’d built.
