It was the worst night of her life.
And somehow through all of it she had come to me.
This night made up for all the nights that she didn’t come to me. All the nights that she stood me up. And all the times that she let her family dictate her life for her. I no longer cared about none of that. She showed me who she really was in this moment.
I held her tighter.
Street was the heavyweight champion of the world and Brielle’s father was in jail for the shit she did. Before they got him to the precinct, he was singing like a canary, and placing all of the blame on BJ. He was immediately picked up too. Letting the justice system handle that, and not taking matters into my own hands when my cousin first found out, that shit was hard as hell.
My uncle had finally gotten his justice.
I should have been on top of the world with all the good shit going on around me.
Instead I was sitting in my house alone for the sixth night in a row staring at a phone that Simone wasn’t answering.
I had called over 100 times since the DNA results dropped. All them calls, zero answers. I had pulled up to her house twice and knocked until my knuckles hurt and she never came to the door. When I tried my key on the third visit it didn’t work. She had changed her locks without saying a word to me about it and that hit harder than anything she could have said out loud.
I had tried going through Brielle.
That lasted about thirty seconds before she shut me down and told me that it wasn’t her business or her place. Street and Bri had been at his place together since the night of Veteran’s arrest. I had caught Brielle briefly in the hallway and asked her to talk to Simone for me and she had looked at me with genuine sympathy and told me she loved me like family but this was between me and Simone and she was staying out of it completely.
I respected it. That shit didn’t make it easier but I respected it nonetheless.
I was glad for Street though. I meant that from the bottom of everything I had. That man had been in love with Brielle since he was a skinny kid from the hood sitting in a private school cafeteria not knowing if he belonged there.
He had always belonged with her. Anybody who had been around them for five minutes knew it. Kyla was a good woman and I genuinely felt bad for how that ended but Street’s heart had always been in one place and everybody knew it including Kyla, I’m sure.
She had told him to choose and he had chosen. I damn sure didn’t expect this. He was feeling Kyla one day and the next he was back under whatever damn spell Bri had.
That was Street. He had always known what was real to him.
I just wished I could figure out how to fix what was real in my own life.
My phone buzzed on the coffee table.
Sandra texted.
I picked it up.
Sandra: Something is wrong with Amara. I don’t know who else to call. Please come now. I’m at my mother’s address.
She sent an address right after.
I was off that couch and grabbing my keys before I finished reading it.
What the hell had happened to my baby?
—
The address took me to the other side of the city. Forty five minutes out, away from everything familiar, into a stretch of neighborhood that got quieter and more spread out the further I drove.
Houses sitting far apart from each other. Trees. Dark streets with no foot traffic. The kind of area where nobody was watching and nobody would hear anything that happened. Why would Sandra momma live all the way out here?
I noticed all of that and drove toward it anyway because Amara was there and that was the only thing that mattered.
Sandra’s truck was parked outside when I pulled up. The house was dark from the outside except for one light somewhere in the back. I got out and went straight to the door and knocked hard.
No answer.
