Stephen and Kwame. My parents are sitting next to each other on the couch with Kwame in between them, holding a phone I don’t recognize, their heads bent over a piece of paper.
“What’s going on?”
They all look up when I walk into the room, and I know right away this is even worse than I thought it would be and a weight settles on my chest. “Arsinoé, why?” My mother’s eyes are full of disappointment and horror. My father doesn’t look up, and I can’t bring myself to even look at Kwame.
“Why what?”
“Why do you have a gun?” She holds up the certificate of ownership.
I frown, alarmed, caught off guard, and irritated all at once “Did you open my mail?”
“No, I did.” Stephen gets to his feet, his expression full of worry. “And I was so shocked I felt like your parents needed to see it.”
I glare at him. “Why? Did you hit your head and forget that I’m an adult?”
“Between this, the way you left your job, left me. I felt like I had to say something.” He has concern etched all over his traitorous face.
“Sin, why did you buy a gun? You know how we feel about weapons.” My mother sounds hurt and disappointed.
I wish I could beat Stephen over the head with my shoes.
I turn to face her and my stomach sinks. She looks horrified. “Yes, I know, but I feel safe with it.”
“Safe from what? You’ve lived your whole life without one.”
“If you still lived with me you wouldn’t need that,” Stephen says.
I sputter a laugh, mind boggled that he said it with a straight face.
I didn’t want my family to know what kind of man he really was. But, the truth is, I didn’t want them to know what a fool I’d been.
I turn to my parents and the alarm on their faces makes me my stomach hurt. My eyes fill with tears. Everything I’ve been carrying suddenly feels like too much and I wish I’d told them to begin with. “The week before I came home, I walked in on someone robbing ourapartment.”
I close my eyes so I can tell the rest without crying. “In hindsight, it was silly of me not to realize something was wrong when the door wasn’t locked.” I clasp my hands together and twirl the ring on my finger as the terror and pain of what followed finds me. “I came face to face with a man running out of my office. He was holding my external hard drive and my laptop.” I shudder the memory.
“I always thought I’d fight back in a situation like that. But when he put a gun in face and told me he was going to kill me all I could do was pray.”
“My God, Arsinoé.” My mother’s hands fly to her face and she looks at my father with stricken eyes. “George, our baby.” She turns back to me, her eyes wide, and my heart constricts at the hurt in them. “Why didn’t you tell us?” My mother gets up and walks over to me. “You have a family. That is what we are for.”
“I didn't know how. I didn’t want it to become a defining story of this part of my life. And I didn’t want you to know what kind of man I’d foolishly stayed involved with.”
“You were happy, Sin.” Stephen protests.
“I wasn’t happy in New York. I wanted to come home, so I did. It was six months ago. It’s all water under the bridge.”
“That’s not that long, and you’ve kept it all to yourself.”
“Ma, I’m fine,” I reassure her when her arms clasp me so tight it hurts.
“Where was Stephen?” My mother’s question draws me back to the story. “Where were you?” she asks a suddenly mute Stephen.
I sigh deeply and continue. “When he finally called me back, he was at the airport about to catch a flight to Vegas for a fight.”
All eyes turn to him, and he takes a step back, his mouth opening and closing repeatedly. Then he points at me. “You cheated on me,” Stephen blurts.
I ignore the collective gasp that ripples through the room and turn on him. Speechless that he laid my shit out like that.
Every eye in the room is on me, but I don’t mind. I’m not ashamed of anything I just shared, but I wouldn’t have done it this way. Now that the truth is out, I wish I’d said something months ago. The burden of this secret was heavy and isolating.
