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The hell?

Mama glanced toward them, but by the time she looked, they were perfectly still.

She picked them up, dropped them into her purse, and headed for the door.

I stood alone inside a mansion that had once represented everything I planned to give my family and realized how fucked up death really was.

I had built all this shit so Lakelyn would eventually come home to me, now I was the only mothafucka who couldn’t leave it.

***

A week later, Mama came back with four strangers.

I knew there was going to be some bullshit the second a contractor walked through my front door carrying a clipboard. Two more men came behind him with measuring equipment, followed by a woman holding fabric and paint samples.

I stepped out of my office.

Ma, what the fuck is going on?

She stood in the middle of my foyer wearing heels and a tan-colored pantsuit like she was about to negotiate a corporate merger instead of apparently letting strangers tear into my house.

“I don’t want anything structural changed,” she told the contractor. “The layout stays exactly as it is.”

Some of the pressure in my chest eased… barely.

“The walls in the guest bedrooms can be refreshed, replace anything worn, service every system in the house, and repair whatever needs repairing. I want the property immaculate.”

The contractor scribbled notes.

“What about the owner’s personal effects?”

Mama answered him calmly. “Let me handle that. I don't want his things damaged, misplaced, or disappearing once someone occupies the property.”

Occupies?

What the fuck you mean, occupies?

The contractor nodded. “And the furniture?”

She continued talking like her dead son wasn’t following her through the foyer cussing.

“Most of it stays. This is not a liquidation. Nobody is stripping my son’s house.”

That should have made me feel better… it didn't.

Mama had always had access to damn near everything that mattered.

Her name had been tied to that house from the day I bought it. I paid for the shit, designed it, built it with Lakelyn in mind, and everybody in Hallowridge knew it as my house, but Mama’s name was on the paperwork too, with full authority over the property. That was intentional. If something ever happened to me, I never wanted her fighting through courts or begging strangers for permission to handle shit that belonged to our family.

The money was set up differently.

Mama wasn’t dipping in and out of my personal accounts whenever she felt like it. I had my own money—couple millions sitting liquid that Lakelyn knew about, enough for everyday life, bills, whatever the hell I wanted without touching anything connected to business.

The business money was different.

One of our main accounts was joint because Mama wasn’t just somebody I trusted with access to my shit… we worked together.

Mama had been part of the drug game long before I ever stepped into it.