And with that he quickly drove back to the hotel. Where he went into his room without ever turning and looking back at me.
47
QUEST
I poured a glass of Banks Reserve and sat on the edge of the bed in a hotel room that still smelled like her and wondered how many times a man had to get burned before he accepted that fire was just what women were made of.
Peanut gave me a son that wasn’t mine and let me hold that baby while he died. Camille faked a pregnancy to trap me. Lyric staged a robbery for attention. Vivica lied about who my father was for thirty-eight years. And Mehar, the one I thought was different, had a whole second life she’d been hiding while I was on my knees worshipping her like she was the only woman on earth.
Five women. Five betrayals. Five lessons that all taught the same thing.
Don’t.
I took a sip and let the cognac burn. Her room was across the hall. Ten feet away. I could hear her moving around in there if I listened hard enough, and I hated that I was listening. Hated that my body was still tuned to her frequency even after what she’d told me. Other men on their knees calling her Dame CoCo while I was out here thinking I was special.
I wasn’t special. I was just the one she liked enough to lie to in person instead of over the phone.
My phone buzzed.
Kacey:Hey Quest. I know you’re busy but I wanted to ask you something. Can you set up a meeting between me and Mehar? I just want to talk to her. Woman to woman.
I stared at the message. Kacey had been digging for months, trying to figure out where Thad was, and she’d landed on Mehar’s name from that Apple ID hack. Now she wanted a sit-down. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve managed this carefully, kept the two of them apart, controlled the information flow, made sure nobody said anything that blew back on the family.
But tonight I didn’t have the energy to manage anything.
Me:We’ll see about it.
I put the phone down and picked it back up. Scrolled to my contacts. Found the name I was looking for.
Peach.
Her contact photo was a picture I’d taken at the roller rink, her laughing with her mouth open and her braids swinging and her eyes squeezed shut in a joy so pure it made my chest hurt to look at it now. That woman in the photo didn’t exist anymore. Or maybe she did, but she was sharing herself with a basement full of men who paid for the privilege, and I was just the idiot who thought he was the only one who got to see her like that.
I pressed delete.
Delete contact “Peach”?
Confirm.
Gone. Just like that. A name erased from a screen the same way trust gets erased from a man who’s run out of chances to give. I finished the cognac and set the glass on the nightstand. I laid back on the bed and stared at the ceiling of a hotel roomthat was too quiet and too empty and too close to a woman I was done with.
Done with her. Done with all of them. Done with opening doors for people who were just going to walk through and burn the house down behind them.
I closed my eyes but I didn’t sleep.
48
MEHAR
I typed “I’m sorry” and deleted it. Typed “Can we talk?” and deleted it. Typed “You don’t understand” and deleted that too, because he understood perfectly and that was the problem.
I set the phone down and paced the hotel room in bare feet and replayed the fight in my head for the hundredth time. “Cool. We done.” Two words and a closed door and the sound of his footsteps disappearing into his room ten feet away. He was right there. Right across the hall. And he might as well have been on another continent.
I couldn’t sit in this feeling. Sitting in feelings was how people drowned and I didn’t drown, I moved. I picked up my phone and called Janelle.
She answered on the second ring even though it was late, which was why she was the best therapist I’d ever had. “Mehar? Is everything okay?”
“I need an emergency session. Can you fit me in tomorrow?”
