Then Legend walked in.
He stopped when he saw us standing there like that.
I stepped back. “I need to eat. I’m starving.”
Neither of them stopped me.
I picked up my food and walked out of the kitchen before anything else could be said.
I didn’t look back, but I felt Reek’s stare on me the whole way out.
15
TARIQ “REEK” HORTON
Legend walked right around me like he hadn’t walked in on anything. He grabbed another plate off the stack and started fixing himself a second one.
I walked over to the table and sat down because my legs suddenly felt strange under me.
I didn’t even know what I was feeling at first. The second I felt the baby kick under my hands, I knew something in me had shifted in a way I couldn’t talk myself out of. I had spent so much time meeting this situation with anger, fear, and resentment. But when I felt the baby move, I didn’t feel any of that. I felt protectiveness. Not fear. Not disgust. Not that trapped feeling. The first thing that hit me was that child was mine, in the realest way. I immediately felt the responsibility of protecting that little life from whatever the world had coming for it.
Then right behind that came regret for how scared I had been, for how long I had been fighting something that was already here, for how much of Ava’s joy I had nearly crushed because I couldn’t get my own fear under control.
And I was in awe. That baby had kicked against my palms like it knew I was his father, like it was already reaching out for me.
I sat at that kitchen table with all that roaring through me and let my eyes fall to my hands. Those same hands had touched too much death, money, guns, and bodies. Yet, just a second ago, they had touchedmy child.
That took me back to being little, back to standing outside my elementary school, watching other kids run straight into their parents’ arms. I would look for my parents even when I knew better. I would watch my classmates showing off papers, drawings and bullshit from class while their mamas bent down to kiss them or their daddies lifted them up like seeing them was the best part of the day. I remembered standing there one day, watching this little girl run screaming excitedly into her father’s arms because she got a sticker for reading good in class. That man spun her around and kissed her face like she’d just won a million dollars. And I had stood there with that same sticker in my hand, and no one to show it off to, because my grandparents made me walk the two miles home to school. I told myself back then, I didn’t care. Over and over, I told myself that lie. That lie had kept me company a long time. It was the same lie I had been using with this baby.
Legend sat down across from me with his plate and a cognac glass of something dark. He ate for a minute before he said, “You want to know one thing I had to learn when I became a father?”
I responded by racing a brow, signaling for him to go on.
“The first time Aria got pregnant, I thought my kids needed the kind of parent I needed when I was young. My parents were good parents, but there were still things I needed from them, and when Aria got pregnant, I thought I had to be whatever my mother and father wasn’t. I wanted to fix my own childhood through them.” He took another sip of his drink before saying,“My therapist had to help me understand that my kids aren’t me. My kids don’t need the exact kind of parents I needed. They aren’t living what I lived. They don’t have the same needs I had. So, if I approached fatherhood from the place of trying to rescue the younger version of me, I’d be parenting from trauma instead of reality.”
I nodded slowly, getting it.
Legend pointed his fork at me. “Your child won’t be abandoned. So, before you even start spiraling, understand that you already won the first battle.”
I couldn’t even look him in the eyes because he was reading me too well, and that kind of vulnerability made me uneasy.
“You’re so focused on what happened to you that you keep acting like the only two options are becoming the people who failed you or running from the job completely.” He shook his head. “That’s not your only options. Stop approaching this baby from your own childhood trauma. Stop looking at that child and seeing only what could go wrong because your shit went wrong. That baby isn’t you. That baby won’t need what you needed. That baby’s story has already started differently because its parents aren’t your parents or your grandparents. Your past doesn’t need you anymore, bro. Your future does, though.”
I just sat with that, and when Legend saw that I was taking it in, he just let me. He picked his fork back up and started eating again like he had said what he came to say and let me absorb it.
He was right. My child wasn’t me. My child wouldn’t go hungry. Even if me and Ava disappeared off of this earth, I knew this family would take it in as their own. My child wouldn’t be dropped off on a porch with a trash bag and forgotten.
I had been so trapped inside what fatherhood looked like through the lens of my own hurt that I hadn’t fully let myself imagine a different version, the version where I stayed, where I learned, where fear didn’t make every decision for me.
I was still scared. But I didn’t want out anymore. I wanted different. I wanted a chance to be someone better than those who had failed me.
For the first time since Ava told me she was pregnant, the future didn’t feel like a trap closing on me. It felt like something I was going to have to learn how to walk into without fear, because there was no way I was ever going to walk away.
The next day, I sat in Jamir's office, with the rest of the crew as Jamir sat in front of a bank of monitors as his fingers flew over a keyboard. We'd called this meet to check how far we'd gotten in painting Sienna as a runner.
“The first stage is in motion,” Jamir told us. “We pushed word through the streets, using informants, that Sienna had been moving weird for weeks, making strange calls and acting like somebody trying to get out of town.”
Icon nodded once. “And the witness?”
