Then my grandfather came out from deeper in the house, already fussing. “What all this noise for?”
“She’s trying to leave that boy with us,” my grandmother answered.
My grandfather looked at me, then at the bag, then rubbed a hand over his face like I was one more bill he hadn’t planned for. “We can’t afford him,” he said flatly. “We barely got enough in here for us.”
My mother started begging then. “Please. Just for a few months. Just till I get on my feet.” Her voice changed in a way that embarrassed me because I had never seen her sound weak for nobody but men. “I’ll give y’all my food stamps every month. He won’t be a burden to y’all. Just keep him ‘til I figure this out.”
Food stamps. I still remember that part. Not because I fully understood money back then, but because the way my grandparents looked at each other told me that was the first thing she had said that mattered.
My grandmother folded her arms. “Your stamps?”
“Yes.”
“All of them?”
“Yes,” my mother said quickly. “I’ll give you my card. He won’t be in y’all way long.”
My grandfather frowned. “A few months turn into forever with people like you.”
“It won’t,” my mother said. “I promise.”
I looked up at her again. “So, you aren’t staying here too, Mommy?”
She snapped her head toward me and said, “Hush.”
My grandmother moved aside first. Not because she wanted me. Because the food stamps made me worth opening the door for.
“Bring that bag in then,” she said.
I didn’t move. So, my mother grabbed my shoulder and pushed me gently toward the doorway. “Go on.”
I looked back at her. I don’t even know what I was hoping to see. Regret, maybe. Love. A sign she was about to change her mind and say we’d figure it out together.
But she was already digging in her purse again, halfway gone before the door even closed.
That was the part that stayed with me. Not just that she left. It was how easy it was for her, like dropping me off was just one more thing on her to-do list.
I stood in my grandparents’ living room, listening to them start arguing immediately about where I was going to sleep, what I was going to eat, and how much trouble I better not be. And all I could think was that I had just watched my mother choose a life without me in it.
PRESENT DAY
10
TARIQ “REEK” HORTON
That memory came back every time anybody talked to me about fatherhood like it was some sweet dream. That was why Ava’s pregnancy felt suffocating, even with me wanting her like hell. All I could see when I thought about a child was a little boy on a porch with a trash bag in his hand, learning too young what it meant to be left where he wasn’t wanted.
I already knew, no matter how much I didn’t want to be a father, there was no way I could keep hustling with the Cartiers and act like the baby Ava was carrying didn’t exist. No matter how angry I was, I could never ignore my child the way I had been ignored. Saint hadn’t needed to tell me that.
That was the part nobody in that room really understood. I wasn’t mad because Ava was pregnant. I was mad because I had been forced into the one position I never wanted to be in, because she hid it, because she waited, because now I was being pushed into having to be more for another human being than anybody had ever been for me.
Aria and Legend’s wing looked like a daycare. Little toys were all over the floor. There were tiny shoes everywhere. Stuffedanimals lined the hallways. The nanny was in there cleaning up. She looked up when she saw me, smiled, and stepped to the side.
I found Ava in the living room area sitting on the edge of the couch crying with her face in her hands.
The second she heard my footsteps, she looked up, saw me, and her expression twisted into disgust and irritation. “Leave me alone.”
I stayed where I was, though. “We need to talk.”
