“Mama.”
“She’s a lovely girl, Amai. Professor at Loyola. Smart, beautiful, goes to church with me every Sunday. You’d like her.”
I dried off slowly, the towel rough against my skin.
“I’m sure she’s great.”
“Then why do you sound like I just asked you to attend your own funeral?”
“Because you’re setting me up, Mama. Again.”
“I’m notsetting you up.” Her voice sharpened slightly. “I’m reminding you that you have a family. That you work too much. That you need to make time for the people who love you.”
I pulled on a pair of sweatpants and walked into my bedroom.
“You can thank Dad for that.”
Silence.
I knew that silence.
It was the silence that came whenever I mentioned Winston Landry and the empire he’d built—the one I’d inherited, expanded, and turned into something he never could.
The silence that saidwe don’t talk about that.
“Just be on time,” she said finally. “Six o’clock. Don’t make me look bad.”
“I won’t.”
“And Amai?”
“Yeah?”
“Wear something nice. Not those jeans you think pass for business casual.”
I almost smiled.
“Yes, ma’am.”
She hung up.
I stood there in the quiet of my bedroom, phone still in my hand, staring at nothing.
Alexis St. John.
Professor. Beautiful. Slim thick, pixie cut, deep mahogany skin, hazel eyes, curvy in all the ways men noticed and appreciated.
She went to church.
She was respectable.
She was exactly the kind of woman my mother wanted me to end up with.
The kind of woman who wouldn’t ask questions.
Who wouldn’t dig.
Who would smile at charity galas and look perfect in photographs and never, ever know what I really did when the sun went down.
