“We should send flowers,” Janelle said. “Or food. Whatever they need.”
Mekhi smiled at her. A real smile, full of love and relief, the smile of a man who believed his family was whole and good and on the same page. He had no idea that his sister and his brother were sitting at this table marinating in rage underneath their performances. He had no idea that the plane crash wasn’t an accident or bad luck or cartel revenge gone right. He had no idea that the blueprint came from this house, from this wheelchair, from the man smiling back at him right now saying “thank God” while his stomach burned with the reality that my enemy was still breathing.
“I’mma go call Justice,” Mekhi said. “I’ll be in the living room.” He turned and walked down the hallway and his footsteps faded and Janelle and I were alone again.
I looked at her. She looked at me. Neither of us said a word. We didn’t need to. The look lasted about three seconds and it said everything that our mouths couldn’t say with Mekhi in the next room.
This isn’t over.
Janelle picked up her fork and went back to eating like nothing had changed. Because for her, nothing had. The plan had failed and the targets were alive and that just meant the plan needed to change. She chewed slowly, deliberately, staring at her plate with the calm focus of a woman who was already thinking about what came next.
I rolled my wheelchair back from the table and looked at the hallway where Mekhi had disappeared. My brother. The man who loved me enough to kill for me, but not enough to let me kill for myself. He was in the next room calling Justice Bankswith joy in his voice, rebuilding a bridge to the family that had taken everything from us, and he didn’t know that the two people closest to him in the world were sitting twenty feet away planning to burn that bridge to ash.
The pork chops were getting cold. I didn’t care. I’d lost my appetite the second Mekhi said the word alive.
24
Serenity
Sarai came into the world at 3:47 in the morning, screaming like she was angry about the eviction. Six pounds, two ounces, a full head of dark curly hair, and lungs that could fill a cathedral. The nurses cleaned her and wrapped her and placed her on my chest and she stopped crying the second her skin touched mine, like she’d been waiting for exactly this and nothing else would do.
I held her, stared at her, counted her fingers and toes, memorized the curve of her nose and the shape of her mouth. I didn’t let go. I didn’t let go because the last time I held a baby like this I only got eleven minutes. Eleven minutes with Kayla before they took her from me and carried her to a family in Silver Spring who would raise her while I spent twelve years haunting the sidewalk outside her school like a ghost who forgot how to cross over. Nobody was taking this one. Sarai was mine and she was staying.
The ankle monitor blinked green against my shin under the hospital blanket. A murder defendant in a maternity ward. That was my life.
Dante showed up around noon the next day. He knocked softly like he wasn’t sure he was welcome, which was fairconsidering the last time we were in a room together I’d slid a folder across a table that rearranged the rest of his life. But when he stepped inside and saw Sarai bundled in my arms, his face did something I hadn’t seen it do since I was a little girl. It softened. Everything hard and guarded and self-preserving about Dante Banks melted off his face and what was left was just a man looking at his granddaughter.
“Can I hold her?” he asked.
I handed her over and watched him cradle her against his chest with a gentleness that felt almost offensive considering how absent those hands had been for most of my life. He rocked her slowly and murmured something I couldn’t hear and for about thirty seconds it looked like a normal family moment. A grandfather meeting his grandchild. The kind of thing people posted on social media with heart emojis and captions about blessings.
It wasn’t that. We both knew it wasn’t that. But I let him have the thirty seconds anyway because Sarai deserved to be held by her grandfather and my feelings about him didn’t get to override that.
“I did everything you asked,” he said quietly, still looking at the baby. “The files are with Xander. The testimony outline is drafted. I’m ready whenever he needs me.”
“Thank you.”
“You don’t have to thank me, Serenity. I should’ve done it without being asked.” He looked up at me and his eyes were wet. “I should’ve done a lot of things without being asked.”
I didn’t respond to that because agreeing would’ve been cruel and disagreeing would’ve been a lie so I just let it sit in the room with us and the baby and the beeping monitors.
Xander came by about an hour later. He stepped in with flowers and a pink stuffed elephant. My hormones were incapable of not noticing. He’d already handled the courts,filed an emergency motion to ensure my ankle monitor status wouldn’t be violated by the hospital stay. The judge approved continued monitoring at the medical facility. Xander had thought of everything before I’d even woken up from the delivery.
“She’s beautiful,” he said, looking at Sarai in my arms. “Congratulations, Serenity. Really.”
“Thank you. For everything. For the flowers and for keeping me out of jail while I was in labor.”
He laughed. “That’s a first for my career. I’ll put it on my resume.” He paused and shifted his weight and something in his posture changed. Less attorney, more person. “Listen, I need to head back to DC for a few days. My girlfriend’s sister is getting married this weekend and I promised I’d be there. But I’ll be reachable by phone and email the entire time and if anything comes up with the case I can be back here in four hours.”
My girlfriend.
The words landed on me like ice water. I felt my smile freeze on my face and I became very interested in adjusting Sarai’s blanket because I needed somewhere to put my eyes that wasn’t his face. My girlfriend. Of course he had a girlfriend. Of course he did. A man who looked like that, who was that smart, that attentive, that present, of course there was a woman at home waiting for him while he was up here saving my life. I was a fool. A complete, delusional fool who’d spent weeks fantasizing about a man’s forearms while he was going home to someone else every night.
“Of course,” I said. My voice sounded normal. I was impressed with myself. “Go. Enjoy the wedding. We’ll be fine here.”
“You sure?”
“Positive. Rita’s here. My father’s here. Go be with your family.”
