Page 41 of Pregnant By A Rich Demon 4

“Boy’s gone,” I said. “The one that was supposed to be yours. He didn’t make it. That happens. Women lose babies every day of the week in this country, some of ’em twice in a year, and they get up the next morning and go to work because life don’t stop and cry with you. What’s left is a girl, and she’s Amai’s. You need to accept that and move the hell on.”

The room went quiet in a way that had a weight to it, the kind of quiet that comes right before something either breaks or doesn’t. For a second, I thought I’d finally get the reaction I was fishing for—the old Kaisen, up out of that chair, yelling about how I don’t understand nothing, how I never cared about nobody, all that. I was braced for it. Half looking forward to it if I’m being truthful, because at least that version of my son I knew how to talk to.

He didn’t move.

“That’s cold, even for you,” Amai said. His tone caught me off guard—not sympathy for his brother, exactly. Amai ain’t built that way when it comes to Kaisen, not after everything between them, but a clean, specific disgust aimed at me, like he’d expected better and wasn’t the least bit surprised he didn’t get it.

“It’s true,” I said, not looking away from Kaisen. “Ain’t cruelty if it’s true. Cruelty is when you lie to a man to keep him comfortable while he’s dying. I’m doing your brother a favor.”

“Some favor,” Amai muttered.

“I didn’t ask you,” I said. “I’m talking to him.”

Kaisen still hadn’t moved, hadn’t raised his voice, hadn’t done a single thing I expected him to do. He just looked at me—steady, level, like he was studying a stranger through a window instead of sitting across from his father—and said, “You’re right.”

I sat back in my chair.

“Say that again,” I said.

“You’re right,” Kaisen repeated, same flat tone, same stillness in his hands. “He’s gone. She’s Amai’s. I understand that.”

“You understand it,” I repeated, like the words might sound different coming out of my own mouth than they had out of his, but they didn’t. They just sat there, too smooth, too easy, a door closing without the slam I was braced for.

“Yes.”

“Just like that.”

“What else would you have me say?” Kaisen tilted his head just slightly, and the corner of his mouth pulled tight. Not a smile, nothing that generous, just a small movement that left me, for the first time in longer than I cared to admit, unsure what I was looking at. “You said suck it up. I’m sucking it up.”

I’ve negotiated with men holding guns on me. I’ve sat across tables from people who wanted me dead and made ’em think twice before they tried it. I knew what it felt like when a room was actually dangerous, and I knew what it felt like when a man was bluffing. And I knew what it felt like when neither of those things was happening. A current running through it that you can’t see but can feel in your feet.

That’s what I felt sitting across from my own son in my own study.

“You don’t sound like yourself,” I said, slower now, because I wasn’t fishing anymore—I was actually asking.

“I don’t feel like myself,” Kaisen said. “But I heard what you said, and I’m not going to argue with you about it. What good would that do? He’s gone. Arguing won’t bring him back. You’ve never once been wrong about a fact just because I didn’t like hearing it. I’m not going to pretend otherwise now.”

Now, I’d raised two boys, and I raised them both to be men who could survive things that would break somebody softer. I take some pride in that despite whatever else I’d done wrong along the way. But there was a difference between a man accepting a hard truth and a man agreeing with you just fast enough and just smooth enough that you start wondering what he’s doing with the rest of what he’s actually feeling, because it damn sure ain’t sitting on the surface where you can see it no more.

I looked over at Amai. He was watching his brother with an expression I hadn’t seen on his face before either—not triumph, which was what I might’ve expected, given the fact that his daughter was the one who lived, and his brother’s son was the one who didn’t. No triumph in it at all. If anything, Amai looked the way I imagine a man looks right before he steps on a floorboard he already knows is rotten, testing his weight against it slowly and hoping it holds.

“Kaisen,” Amai said. His voice had dropped some of its edge, which was rare enough that I noticed it. “You good?”

“I’m fine,” Kaisen said and turned that same steady look on his brother that he’d had on me. “Why does everybody keep asking me that?”

“Because you’re acting like somebody drained you out and filled you back up with something else,” Amai said plain, no dressing on it.

Kaisen almost laughed—a short breath through his nose, gone before it fully arrived. “That’s an interesting way to put it.”

“It ain’t a compliment.”

“I didn’t take it as one.”

I sat there and watched the two of them go back and forth like that. Amai poking, careful, almost gentle for him, and Kaisen deflecting every single thing thrown at him with that same flat, agreeable calm. And uncertainty, a feeling I don’t visit often, settled in my chest and stayed there. I built this family on the principle that fear moves people in predictable directions. You apply pressure here, a man moves there. You threaten a thing he loves, he complies. I had run this family for thirty-some years off that exact mechanism, and it had never once failed me, not with Amai, not with anybody who ever crossed me, because everybody’s got a thing they’re scared to lose. Once you find it, you own them.

But I looked at my son sitting in that chair, and for the first time in his natural life, I could not find the thing he was scared to lose. And a man with nothing left to threaten is a man you can’t move no more. That’s not peace. That’s the most dangerous thing a person can become.

I didn’t say any of that out loud, of course. A man doesn’t hand his own uncertainty to the room like a gift. But I filed it the way I filed everything, in the back part of my mind where I kept the things I intended to watch closer than I let on.