PROLOGUE
Xavier “Zay” Woods
“Fuck!” I hopped out the black SUV before the driver could even finish opening the door.
“Zay, calm down. We’re here now. Relax,” he said calmly, as if my heart hadn’t tried to escape out of my chest.
I ignored him as I jogged past him and up the sidewalk toward the brick building. The sound of my boots echoed off the concrete. The parking lot was packed with cars that lined up crookedly with their hazards blinking—other parents who appeared to be late like me stepped out of them.
All theresponsibleparents were already inside.
My phone buzzed in my pocket for the third time since I’d hopped out of the jet and jumped straight into the SUV. I ignored it again. Between studios, meetings, and emails, everything blurred lately. Cities stopped feeling like adventures and started to feel like stopovers. L.A., Atlanta, New York, then back again. My life ran on departure times and deadlines, yet somehow, I was always behind.
I was exhausted. I hadn’t slept for two days. My body felt like it was vibrating.
But I was gonna make this.
I was out of breath by the time I reached the door. A woman with orange hair and a small frame happened to reach the door as soon as I had. Both out of breath, we sighed and let out soft chuckles with one another. I felt that she shared my same thoughts about running late. I held the door open for her, and she walked in quietly as I followed.
The high school looked more like a college campus. It didn’t look like the high school in Detroit I went to—well, at least from what I recalled from the days I had shown up. I hardly went after my mother died when I was in the ninth grade, but after I got out of jail for beating my stepfather’s ass, I would show up a few times just to get breakfast.
That was before I gathered the courage to speak to my first love again after I got locked up so fast that I had no time to explain to her what happened. That I never meant to just disappear. I didn’t have her address and couldn’t remember her number by heart, either. I had to wait until I got out to hit her up on Myspace, and even then, it took me a while. I thought she would cuss me out or ignore me altogether, but she was the sweetest about it. That, and also, she had heard things about me. She’d heard that I slept on buses after my car got towed with all my things inside, sold dope with my homeboys, and tried my best to make my music happen. She snuck me into her bedroom window almost every night after that.
Smiling at the memory, I slowed my pace once I reached the auditorium doors and placed my palms on my knees.
“Get it together,” I whispered to myself, out of breath. “Just breathe.” I straightened, rolled my shoulders back, and pushed one of the heavy doors open slowly, careful not to let it creak.
The sound of the music hit me first. I recognized it immediately. It was the same tune that my daughter had rehearsed for months, all for this big day.
A single piano note softly stretched through the space as it trembled. I froze in the doorway and didn’t even bother to look around for a seat. I couldn’t miss it. It was too important.
The lights were dim, but the stage was illuminated. I put my back against the wall and waited.
The room was quiet as it silently waited for what would come next.
Then, my daughter stepped into the spotlight.
Yana looked taller somehow. Her hair was in a curly ponytail that fell down her back. She wore a white dress with gold wings, since her character was the main angel in the play. Her shoulders were back, and she held her head high. She didn’t hide that time. Over the past year, her confidence had grown tremendously.
The mic caught the slight inhale before she sang, and when her voice came out clearly—strong and steady—it damn near knocked the breath out of me.
I swallowed hard.
She joined the drama club after we met. After everything came out.
Her mother, Princess, told me she’d always liked to sing but never wanted to be seen. She had been too shy, too unsure. As I watched her then, owning the stage, I felt something split open in my chest.
I hated that I missed out on her growing up.
I hadn’t known that her mother was pregnant, but when Princess Love Melendez—now known as best-selling author Love Tate—would bring me warm plates of her mother’s cooking during those Detroit winter nights in her bedroom, I knew something special would come out of it. When we reconnectedlast year on her book-to-film adaptation, it all came out. I was upset for a while, and it took some time to process. But when I first looked into my daughter’s eyes and saw my mother’s, . . . that heaviness I’d felt inside of me since my mother’s passing had lifted. I knew then that I would do anything for my baby girl. That included learning to forgive her mother, who was also young and made the decision she thought was best at the time.
Princess told me she kept the secret because she didn’t want me to have to choose between them and my music, which I had strived for. I had also told her that I couldn’t see myself being a father because I never had one. Between not knowing my biological one and my stepfather using me as his personal punching bag, I couldn’t see myself doing either to my own.
I watched as Yana’s eyes swept the crowd, and I saw a flicker of uncertainty. She scanned the room from right to left until her eyes finally found me.
When they did, her whole body changed.
Her confidence snapped back into place like muscle memory. She smiled and tapped two fingers against her right eyebrow as she sang louder. That gesture had become our inside joke between just the two of us to signal to each other that everything was okay. She started it when she noticed that, when I was under pressure, I instinctively swiped my eyebrows with two fingers. Whenever she caught it, she would smile and tap fingers against hers.
