I looked at him for a long moment. This man who knew my whole history. Who’d held me through nightmares at seventeen and never asked what I was dreaming about, because he already knew. Who married me at twenty-one because we thought love was enough to fix everything that was broken in us. It wasn’t. Love is not a contractor. It doesn’t renovate trauma. It just moves in and hopes the foundation holds, and ours didn’t.
“Whatever,” I said. “It’s in the past. We were both young and dumb and carrying too much. I’ve made peace with it. I didn’t call you to rehash our marriage, Julius. I called you because I needed a ride and you were the only person I could call without getting a lecture or a trunk.”
He laughed at that. “A trunk?”
“Don’t ask.”
“Your brothers are something else.”
“You don’t know the half.” I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around them. “Look, I appreciate the room and the groceries and you coming to check on me. I really do. But I’m okay. I’m figuring things out. You can go.”
“You sure? I can stick around if you need company.”
“I’m sure. I’ve got some things I need to do today.”
He stood up and put his jacket on and paused at the door. “Ren, whatever you need. Whenever you need it. I’m a phone call away. No strings, no expectations. Just me being here for you the way I should’ve been a long time ago.”
“Goodbye, Julius. I don’t need shit else from you.”
“Well, the room is paid up for seven days. If you need more, let me know.”
I nodded my head and guided him out. I was still angry at him for sleeping with my best friend. That shit sent me down a dark path. On top of all my other traumas, it was that situationthat led me to being with someone like Mega. I quit working for my brother’s company and took on a dangerous job because I needed to separate myself. I needed to think for myself.
If it wasn’t my mother trying to run my life, it was my brothers. But now it was time I ran my own life. I had a future to really think about.
I got dressed properly, slicked my edges, put on enough makeup to look alive without looking like I was trying, and called an Uber to a cafe I knew in Silver Spring. It was a small spot on a side street with big windows and good chai lattes and outdoor seating that faced a middle school across the road. I’d been coming here every Friday for almost a year. Before Mega, before the coke, before rehab, before all of it. Every Friday at 2:45 PM I’d order a chai latte and sit by the window and wait.
Today wasn’t Friday. It was a Wednesday. But I’d missed so many Fridays during rehab that the need to be here was physical, a pull behind my ribs that I couldn’t ignore. I ordered my chai and sat at my usual table and looked out the window at the school and waited for the bell.
It rang at 3:15. The doors opened and kids started pouring out the way they always did, loud and chaotic, backpacks bouncing, phones already in their hands, some of them running toward buses and some of them clustering in groups on the sidewalk and some of them walking alone with earbuds in, lost in their own twelve-year-old worlds.
I scanned the crowd the way I always did. Methodical, patient, starting at the main entrance and working my way across the sidewalk. My heart was beating faster than it should’ve been for a woman just sitting in a cafe drinking chai. But it always beat like this on these days. Every single time.
And then I saw her.
She came out of the side door near the gym, talking to another girl, her backpack hanging off one shoulder. She had onjeans and a pink hoodie and white Air Forces that were scuffed on the toes from being worn every day. Her kinky curly hair was in two French braids that somebody had done neatly that morning, and she was laughing at something her friend said, her head thrown back, her whole face wide open with joy.
She looked like me. Not obviously, not in anything a stranger would catch, but a mother sees different. The shape of her eyes. How she stood with one hip cocked to the side. How she used her hands when she talked, animated and expressive, like her body couldn’t hold the energy of what she was saying. She had my mouth. My mother’s cheekbones. And a laugh that carried across the street and through the window and landed in my chest like a fist.
I used to come here every Friday to watch her.
Before rehab, this was my routine. My secret ritual that nobody knew about. Not my brothers, not Mega, not Julius, not Rita, nobody. Every Friday at 2:45 I sat in this cafe and watched my daughter walk out of school and I memorized whatever I could from a distance because a distance was all I was allowed to have.
I was sixteen when I had her. Sixteen, terrified, and trapped at a boarding school in Connecticut with a baby inside me that was put there by a man who was supposed to be teaching me AP English. My mother flew up when the school called her. She took one look at me, one look at my belly, and made every decision that came after without asking me a single question. She pulled me out of Ashford, put me in a private facility upstate until I delivered, and arranged the adoption through a lawyer who owed her a favor. I held my daughter for eleven minutes before they took her. Eleven minutes of her tiny fingers wrapped around my index finger and her eyes squinting up at me, trying to focus on the face of the woman who was about to disappear from her life.
My mother told me it was for the best. Told me I was too young, that this would ruin me, that nobody could ever know. And I believed her because I was sixteen and she was my mother and she was the only person who came for me when nobody else did. She handled the situation at Ashford too. The teacher who did this to me was dealt with, quietly and permanently, and my mother made sure no one ever connected me to what happened to him. That was Vivica. Ruthless when it counted. Criminal when she had to be. The same woman my brothers locked up for going after Prime’s wife was the woman who saved my life at sixteen. People are complicated like that.
It took me years to find her. My daughter. The adoption was closed, the records were sealed, and every legal avenue I tried hit a wall. I finally hired a private investigator two years ago who traced her to a family in Silver Spring, Maryland. A good family, from what I could tell. Two parents, a nice house, a dog. She went to this middle school and she played volleyball and she was getting B’s in everything except math where she was getting an A because apparently my baby got the smart gene.
I’d never approach her,because that would violate the adoption. And besides, what if she didn’t know she was adopted? What if she wanted nothing to do with me? I just wanted to see her. I’ve dreamt about her for years. Not a day goes by where she doesn’t tug at my thoughts.
So now I just sit in this cafe every Friday and watch her walk out of school and think about her.
Rehab almost killed me, and not because of the withdrawal. Because I missed her. Thirty days of not sitting in this chair and watching her walk out those doors. Fridays I’d never get back. That’s why I fought going. That’s why I screamed and kicked when Quest put me in that trunk. Not because of the drugs.Because of her. And I couldn’t tell him that. I couldn’t tell any of them because none of them knew she existed.
She was walking toward the bus now, still laughing, still talking with her hands, still the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen from fifty yards away through a coffee shop window. I pressed my palm flat against my stomach where the new baby was just starting to make itself known, barely a bump, barely anything, and I watched my first child get on a bus and disappear down the street.
I sat there until the chai went cold and the school was empty and the street was quiet. Then I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and pulled out my phone and stared at nothing because there was nobody I could call about this. Nobody who would understand. Nobody who knew that I had been a mother since I was sixteen years old and had been grieving it in silence every single day since. That was the real reason for the drugs. It was never about some damned man.
