She was quiet for a second. Then: “Come on, then. But you’re not bringing your mess into my home, Mega. I just moved here.”
“I won’t. I just need a couch and some time.”
“Fine, I’ll text you my address.”
I hung up, started the engine, and pulled out of the prison parking lot heading south. Toward the one person who would take me in without hesitation because that was what family did, even when family was a liability.
My cousin Camille always did have a soft spot for lost causes.
16
Mekhi
“Don’t let him kill me,” Janelle whispered.
She was laid up on a pullout bed in a spot I kept in Hyattsville that nobody knew about. Not Quest, not Zephyr, not my mama before she passed. I bought it cash six years ago through an LLC that wasn’t in my name for exactly this type of situation. The kind where you need to put somebody somewhere and have the world forget they exist for a while.
Janelle’s head was wrapped in white gauze and the bruise on the side of her face had turned a sick yellow-green. Eleven stitches in the back of her skull, a concussion that had her throwing up every few hours, and eyes that looked like a woman who had finally realized she’d gone too far but couldn’t figure out how to get back.
“I’m not gonna let him kill you, Nelle. But what the fuck were you thinking?”
“I just wanted him back.”
“Wanted him back.” I repeated it because hearing it out loud was the only way to process how insane it sounded. “You kidnapped his girl. Chained her to a ceiling. Left her hanging in a warehouse with a man who couldn’t even wipe his own ass. Andyou thought that was gonna get Quest back? In what universe does that work, Janelle?”
“I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“Nah, you was thinking real clearly. You planned this for months. You followed that girl, found her storage unit, extracted Thad, rented a warehouse. That ain’t impulsive. That’s calculated. So don’t sit here and tell me you wasn’t thinking clearly because you was thinking clearer than you been thinking in years. You just wasn’t thinking smart.”
She looked away from me and I could see her jaw working, grinding on something she wanted to say but kept pulling back. I knew my sister. I’d known her my whole life. I could tell when she was holding something back because her left eye would twitch and she’d start picking at her cuticles. Both things were happening right now.
“What ain’t you telling me?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“Janelle.”
“It’s nothing, Mekhi. I just… I made mistakes. With Quest, with Quindon, with all of it. And I thought if I could just remove her from the equation, maybe he’d remember what we had.”
“What y’all had died when Quindon died. You know that.”
Something flickered across her face when I said Quindon’s name. Quick, almost invisible, but I caught it because I’d been reading my sister’s face since she was in diapers. It wasn’t grief. It was guilt. And the guilt looked different from the guilt I’d seen before, heavier, older, like it had layers I hadn’t peeled back yet.
“Quest got a vasectomy because of what you did,” I said. “You understand that? That man loved that boy so much that when he found out Quindon wasn’t his, he decided he was never having kids again. You took that from him. And now you took his girl too. How many times are you gonna blow up this man’s life before you let him be?”
“You don’t understand everything that happened.”
“Then explain it to me.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, shook her head. “Not right now. I can’t.”
I stared at her for a long time. My baby sister with the busted head and the secrets she wouldn’t let go of. I loved this woman. Loved her since the day my mama brought her home from the hospital and put her in my arms and told me it was my job to protect her. And I’d been doing it ever since, through bad boyfriends and bad decisions and a shopping addiction that put her ninety-four thousand dollars in the hole. But this was different. This wasn’t a bad decision. This was a crime. And the man she’d committed it against was the closest thing I had to a brother outside of Zephyr.
“Stay here,” I told her. “Don’t leave, don’t call nobody, don’t post nothing. If you go outside, I can’t protect you. You hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“I mean it, Nelle. Stay put.”
