“Nothing right now. I’ll go see her and find out what I can. If she has him, I’ll know.” He stood up and headed for the doorand I thought he was going to leave without another word, but he stopped with his hand on the handle and turned back to me.
“I told you to get rid of that nigga a long time ago. You should’ve listened.”
He walked out and closed the door behind him. I stood in my hotel room alone with an empty cage, a missing prisoner, a broken relationship, and the growing realization that the walls of my life were collapsing inward, and I didn’t know which one was going to crush me first.
49
MEHAR
Janelle was right. She was always right.
I left the session feeling lighter than I had in days, which wasn’t saying much because the bar was underground. But she’d walked me through the breakup with Quest without judgment, without telling me I was wrong or he was wrong, just helping me see the situation from both sides. She’d said that his reaction came from a place of deep wounding and that my refusal to quit came from a place of self-preservation and that two people operating from pain at the same time will almost always collide instead of connect.
“Neither of you is the villain in this,” she’d said. “You’re both just protecting the parts of yourselves that have been hurt the most.”
She’d also asked me about how I was sleeping and eating and whether I’d been keeping up with my journaling. I hadn’t. She told me to start again tonight, even if it was just three sentences. ‘Write what you’re feeling without editing it,’ she’d said. ‘Let the page hold it so your body doesn’t have to.
After the session, I ran errands to keep my mind occupied. Grocery store for things I didn’t need. Target for candles and a new journal. I stopped at a coffee shop on Connecticut Ave andsat by the window for an hour scrolling apartments on Zillow and pretending I was okay. Then I drove to the school to check on my enrollment status for next semester because forward motion was the only medicine I trusted.
By the time I pulled into the hotel parking garage, it was early evening and the sun was cutting through the concrete levels in long orange slashes. I found my usual spot on the second level near the elevator. The garage was quiet, most of the spaces empty. I turned off the engine and sat there for a second, checking my phone. A text from Zainab asking how I was doing. A missed call from Bryce. A CashApp notification from a client tribute I hadn’t opened yet.
I grabbed my purse and opened the car door.
I didn’t hear them. Didn’t see them. Something hard cracked against the back of my skull and my vision split in two. My knees hit the concrete and before I could scream a hand grabbed my braids and slammed my face into the side of my car. I tasted blood and felt my body being dragged and then there was nothing.
50
QUEST
Kacey opened the door with red eyes and a baby on her hip, and I knew within five seconds that she didn’t have Thad.
I’d driven out to Frederick to read her face in person because phone calls were for people who didn’t know how to spot a lie, and I spotted lies the way other people spotted traffic lights. Kacey was a lot of things. She was persistent, desperate, angry, exhausted, but she wasn’t hiding a kidnapped man in her four-bedroom house in the suburbs. Her energy was all wrong for it. She was too frayed, too open, too willing to beg.
“Quest, please,” she said, bouncing the baby on her hip while her older daughter watched cartoons on the couch behind her. “I know Mehar knows something. I can feel it. Just let me talk to her. Woman to woman. Five minutes.”
“She doesn’t have anything to do with Thad.”
“Then why was her name in his phone? Why was she the last person he contacted before he disappeared? That doesn’t make sense unless she knows something.”
“Kacey, I’m telling you she’s not involved. I’m looking into it. I told you I’d help you find him, and I will.”
“You’ve been saying that for months.” Her voice cracked. “My kids ask me where their daddy is every day, and I don’t have ananswer. Every single day, Quest. Do you know what that does to a mother?”
I looked at her holding that baby and thought about Quindon and thought about Peanut and thought about all the women in the world raising children alone because the men in their lives had either left or been taken, and I felt something shift in my chest that I didn’t have time to examine.
“I’m working on it,” I said as I handed her a wad of cash. “That’s all I can give you right now.”
She nodded because she didn’t have a choice. I left and got back on the road toward the city.
In the car, I called Mehar. Voicemail. I figured she was still in therapy or running errands or doing whatever women did when they were avoiding men who’d broken their hearts. I called again ten minutes later. Voicemail. On the third try, twenty minutes after the first, the line didn’t even ring. Straight to voicemail. Her phone was either dead or off.
Mehar’s phone was never off. This was a woman who slept with a gun on her nightstand and checked exits every time she walked into a room. Her phone was her lifeline, and it was always charged and always on.
Something wasn’t right.
My phone rang before I could call a fourth time. Mekhi.
“We got him,” Mekhi said. His voice was tight with adrenaline. “The kid from the apartment off Georgia Ave. The one connected to Keyvon’s sister. I’ve been watching the building like you said, and I grabbed him this morning. He’s in the basement at Silk and Sin right now.”
