• • •
It was past nine when I picked up my phone again. Sarai was asleep on my chest and Rita was snoring softly in the recliner with her glasses crooked and the TV still going. The room was dark except for the blue glow of the screen and the green blink of my ankle monitor under the blanket.
I scrolled to my recent calls and found the Maryland number from days ago. Ayanna Lake. The last time I’d dialed this number I hadn’t been the one to call. She’d called me. And the conversation had lasted less than a minute before my body shut it down and sent me into labor.
This time would be different. This time I was choosing it.
It had been twelve years of silence because I convinced myself she was better off not knowing me. That my presence would only complicate the clean, beautiful life the Lakes had given her.
But silence wasn’t protection. It was cowardice dressed up as sacrifice. And Kayla had already heard my voice. She’d already asked to speak with me. She’d already crossed the line I’d been too afraid to approach for over a decade and all she’d gotten in return was three seconds and a scream.
I owed her more than that. I owed her everything.
My thumb hovered over the number. Sarai shifted on my chest, her tiny body adjusting, her warmth spreading through my hospital gown. I was holding my second daughter and about to call my first and the distance between the two of them was twelve years and a lifetime of choices I couldn’t undo.
I pressed call.
It rang three times. Each ring was a decade. Then the line clicked.
“Hello?” Ayanna’s voice was cautious but not hostile. She sounded like a woman who’d been expecting this call and wasn’t sure how she felt about it arriving.
“Mrs. Lake, this is Serenity. Serenity Banks. I’m sorry to call so late. I know last time was… I’m sorry about how that ended. There was a medical emergency and I?—”
“I know. Your attorney explained. Are you and the baby alright?”
“We are. Thank you.” I took a breath. “I’m calling because I’d like to speak with Kayla. If she’s still willing. If you’ll allow it.”
Ayanna was quiet for a long time. Long enough for me to hear a television in the background and a man’s voice, Stefan probably, asking who was on the phone. Long enough for Sarai to exhale against my chest. Long enough for me to considerhanging up and going back to the café across the street and the silence that was easier than this.
“She’s been asking about you,” Ayanna said finally. “Every day since the last call. She wants to know if you’re okay.”
My eyes burned. “Can I talk to her?”
Another pause. Then: “Hold on.”
I heard footsteps, a door opening, Ayanna’s muffled voice saying something I couldn’t make out. Then more footsteps, lighter this time, quicker, the sound of a twelve-year-old moving through a house toward a phone that held something she’d been waiting her whole life to hear.
“Hello?”
Kayla’s voice. Small and clear and careful and completely real.
And this time, I didn’t scream. This time, I stayed.
30
Justice
Creed called at six in the morning while I was sitting in the hospital cafeteria in Grenada drinking the worst coffee I’d ever tasted and staring at a spreadsheet on my laptop that had nothing to do with Banks Reserve and everything to do with dismantling the Rios family from the ground up.
“I got something for you,” Creed said.
“Talk to me.”
“My people at the Port of Baltimore flagged a container tied to a Rios front company called Solana Import Group. It’s a shell. They move Colombian product through there disguised as agricultural goods. This particular container is carrying roughly eight hundred kilos of cocaine packed inside crates of dried plantains. It arrives Tuesday morning. Dock 7. Container number SLNU-4829107.”
Eight hundred kilos. At street value that was somewhere north of forty million dollars. Forty million in one container moving through Baltimore like it was nothing. That’s how the Rios family operated. Big, bold, and untouchable because nobody had ever been stupid enough or angry enough to touch them.
We were both.
