“Say it,” I told him.
“What she did was wrong. Almost unforgivable.” Kareem met my eyes. “Almost. But Ducane, I drove you two around for years. I heard every one of those backseat conversations about the life y’all were gonna build. The house. The kids. Running off where your daddy couldn’t reach you. That girl loved you like I ain’t never seen, and I watched what losing her did to you.” He turned back to the road. “All I’m saying is, whatever she did, she did it scared, not cold. Don’t let the fear she had back then cost you the family you have been waiting for. That’s all.”
I didn’t say anything for a minute. He wasn’t wrong, and we both knew it.
“I hear you, Kareem.” That was all I had.
I looked out the window and let Coupeville roll past while I turned it all over in my head. Carter, especially, my boy, the one who’d been right there through all of it. I heard Skye asking me to let him off the hook. I wasn’t doing that. Everyone was going to feel my wrath, starting with Carter.
We pulled up to the courts closest to the college, and there they were. Carter, LaDrake, and Carlos, shooting around, already talking trash before I even made it to the court. I couldn’t believe I’d been gone for damn near a decade.
I was out of the car before Kareem came to a full stop.
Carlos saw me first. “My nigga, Cane. Welcome home.”
I dapped him up and turned to Carter, who set the ball down on the asphalt nice and slow. He didn’t run. Didn’t throw his hands up. He just turned, squared his shoulders to me, and waited, because he was a real one, and a real one knew when he had a fade coming.
I walked up to him and put my fist in his stomach.
He grunted, folded, the air going out of him in one gust. I got down close to his ear.
“You know what that’s for, nigga.”
LaDrake moved. “Aye, hold on, hold on?—”
“Get the fuck on, Drake. This is between me and him.”
“Leave him alone,” Carter threw a hand back at him, still hunched, still pulling air. “He owes me that one.”
LaDrake stopped. Him and Carlos backed off the blacktop and let us have it, because they weren’t slow, they could see this wasn’t really a fight.
“I owe you a body bag, but I fuckin consider us boys. You foul Carter. Y’all niggas too.”
“I don’t know shit that’s going on,” LaDrake said, hands up.
Carter came up slow, one hand on his stomach, and looked me right in my eyes.
“That it? Or you got more in you?”
“My daughter, Carter. Mine. You broke bread with my child every Sunday and ain’t say a word.”
“You’re right.” Not an ounce of flinch in him. “I knew.”
My jaw flexed so hard it hurt.
“And I’d do it the same way again, so hear me out before you swing on me twice.” He spat to the side and squared back up. “Skye came to us pregnant and terrified. Your wife came to us.”
“Wife?” Carlos questioned.
“Carter, Cadence is Ducane’s?” LaDrake asked, looking between us. “Bro hell nah.”
“Fuck y’all, she showed up crying at my kitchen table at three in the morning, asking me to help keep her baby safe. That’s Airalynn’s blood. That’s the family sleeping under my roof. You think I was finna sell her out for a nigga who’d already let his daddy ship him four hours away.”
“This is about you. About what you did and didn’t do. I’m sick of y’all niggas blaming me.”
“Nah.” Carter shook his head slowly. “This is about your daddy. And you still can’t see it.” He stepped in. “Cane, wake up. That man hates you. Always has. He just dressed it up as control so you’d keep calling it love.” He dropped that shit on me like a bomb. “And if you think for one second Ruben Simmons didn’t know he had a granddaughter walking around this city, you’re dumber than I ever took you for.”
The court went silent.
