“Thank you,” she whispered.
I nodded, not trusting my voice. My heart was pounding so hard I was sure she could hear it. “Get some rest, okay? And eat the soup while it’s still warm.”
“I will.”
I turned and walked back to my car, feeling her eyes on me the whole way. When I pulled away from the curb, I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw her still standing on the porch, holding the container of soup like it was something precious.
My father’s warning echoed in my head:Stay away from that woman. Kill whatever you’re feeling before it kills you.
But as I drove home through the darkening streets of New Orleans, I knew it was already too late for that.
Chapter 20
AMAI
Itold myself I was just checking in.
That’s what I’d been doing all week—sending texts, asking how she was feeling, making sure she was eating. Professional concern. The kind of attention you’d give to any high-value investment. That’s what I told myself as I drove through the Seventh Ward at three in the afternoon on a Wednesday, my suit jacket folded on the passenger seat, and my tie loosened just enough to breathe.
The truth was harder to swallow.
The truth was that I’d woken up at 5:00 AM thinking about her throwing up in Delphine’s bathroom. That I’d sat through two meetings barely hearing a word because my mind kept circling back to the way her voice sounded on the phone last week—exhausted, defeated, trying so hard to sound fine when she clearly wasn’t. That I’d finally told Raymond to reschedule everything after lunch because I couldn’t focus on contracts and territory disputes when Truth was seven weeks pregnant and couldn’t keep anything down.
I pulled up to the shotgun house and cut the engine.
The neighborhood was alive in that mid-afternoon way—kids on bikes, someone’s radio playing Juvenile from an openwindow, the smell of somebody’s grill already going even though it wasn’t even four o’clock yet. A few people on porches tracked my car with the kind of attention that said they knew exactly who I was, even if they’d never seen my face.
I got out and buttoned my suit jacket out of habit, then immediately unbuttoned it again. Too formal. Too much. I was walking into Delphine Renois’s house, not a boardroom.
The porch steps creaked under my weight. I could hear music playing inside—something old school, maybe the Isley Brothers—and the sound of someone moving around in the kitchen. I knocked twice, firm but not aggressive.
Footsteps. Then the door swung open, and Delphine stood there in house shoes and a faded LSU t-shirt, a dish towel thrown over her shoulder. Her eyes went from surprised to knowing in about half a second.
“Back again huh?” she said, one eyebrow raised.
“Yes ma’am.”
She looked me up and down—the suit, the shoes, the watch I should have left in the car. Then she looked past me at the Mercedes parked at the curb, and something shifted in her expression. Not disapproval exactly. More like confirmation of something she’d already suspected.
“You sure are involved for this to be an arrangement,” she said, her voice carrying that particular tone mothers use when they’re calling you out without actually calling you out.
I met her eyes. Didn’t flinch. “Just trying to be here for Truth.”
Delphine studied me for another long moment. Then, she smirked—just a little, just enough—and stepped aside. “Well, come on in then. She’s on the couch looking pitiful.”
I walked past her into the house, and the temperature of my entire world shifted.
The living room was small, crowded with furniture that had seen better decades, but it was clean and lived-in in a way my house had never been. Pictures on every surface—Truth as a baby, Truth and her sisters at somebody’s graduation, Delphine younger and smiling with a man I assumed was Truth’s father. The couch was floral print and sagging in the middle. The coffee table had water rings and a stack of magazines. The whole place smelled like whatever Delphine was cooking in the kitchen—something with onions and bell pepper, something that made my stomach wake up and pay attention.
Truth was curled up on the couch in sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt, her hair pulled back in a messy bun, one hand pressed against her stomach. She looked up when I walked in and her eyes went wide.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, sitting up too fast and then wincing.
“Checking on you.” I moved toward the couch, my expensive shoes silent on the worn carpet.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” I sat down next to her, close enough that our knees almost touched. “You only say you’re fine when you’re really not. I had to make sure.”
