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He’d grown so much. Aside from the height, his shoulders were broader, and his jaw was more prominent. His baby fat had melted away. He was becoming a man — and under the guidance of Roman.

Roman would continue to poison my child if I didn’t get him away.

There was so much hope flooding me. I swear I felt the same oxytocin rush that I had when I’d just given birth to him.

I just wanted to run to him and hug him. I wanted to fix his collar. One side was folded under the strap of his bag. I wanted to reach over and straighten it, then ask whether he'd eaten lunch or needed something before he went home.

He turned his head toward the street.

I saw the black eye.

“Oh, my God.”

The words came out before I could stop them.

The skin beneath his eye was dark and swollen. He kept his head slightly lowered, but I could see it clearly when he looked toward the gate.

Roman had hit him.

I knew it as soon as I saw his face. I had worn too many of that man's bruises to stand there making excuses for him now.

My hand tightened around the phone.

That nigga had put his hands on my son. Keenan was living in a house with him, and I had no idea how often this was happening.

I looked at the rest of his face, then his hands. His uniform covered everything else. I couldn't tell if anything hurt when he moved or whether that eye was the only thing Roman had done to him.

I needed to ask him. I needed to get close enough to hear his voice and know he was okay.

He wasn't okay. He had a black eye, and there wasn’t anything I could do for him right now. We were both hopeless.

I stepped forward before I caught myself.

A car passed between us. I waited for it to clear, breathing hard as if I had already run across the road.

“Keenan,” I whispered.

There was no way he could hear me from how far I was.

I wanted him to look up anyway. I wanted him to see me and come over so I wouldn't have to stand there wondering whether he loved me.

But I needed to be better prepared to talk to him. Yelling out his name would bring too much heat to me.

I moved back beside the tree.

Tears blurred my eyes. I wiped them away before I lost sight of him.

He had already been through enough. Golden was gone, and he had been left with what happened to her. He should've had somebody helping him through that. Instead, Roman was destroying him even more. Trying to mold him into a mini Roman.

I had been sitting at Aubrey's trying to figure out how to get a job and somewhere to live. Meanwhile, my son was walking around with his father's fist on his face.

I couldn't keep doing this from a distance.

A couple of boys stopped near him. One said something, and Keenan shook his head. They kept walking. He stayed by the fence, shifting his bag from one shoulder to the other.

Then a girl came down the steps behind him.

I recognized her before she reached the bottom.