The look on his face told me that he knew I knew.
I leaned back in my chair and watched him take the seat across from me. For several seconds, neither one of us spoke. Mace kept his expression controlled, but his jaw was tightenough to tell me he was preparing himself for whatever he thought was coming.
I slid Sam’s phone across the desk.
“You could’ve told me,” I said.
His eyes dropped to the screen before returning to mine. “How much you read?”
“Enough.”
He looked away and rubbed both hands across his face. “Fuck.”
“That’s all you gotta say?”
“I mean… What you want me to say?”
“The truth would be a good place to start.”
Mace leaned back in the chair and stared toward the door. I’d seen him face men holding guns without blinking, but right now, he looked like he wanted to be somewhere else.
“We were together,” he finally said.
“I figured that part out.”
“For almost two years.”
That was longer than I expected.
I sat here trying to imagine how many times I’d been in the same room with them during those two years without realizing what was happening. “Why the fuck you didn’t tell me?”
His eyes came back to mine. “It wasn’t that simple.”
“What wasn’t simple about it?”
“Everything.” Mace let out a frustrated breath and leaned forward. “Sam wasn’t ready for everybody to know.”
“I ain’t everybody.”
“I know.”
His expression intensified. “Vice, this wasn’t about not trusting you. He just wasn’t ready to deal with people looking at him different. His mama. The family. Everybody around us. You know how these niggas talk, and Sam didn’t want his whole life turning into a fucking discussion.”
I thought about my aunt and the family members who always had an opinion about something that didn’t involve them. Sam had grown up hearing the same things the rest of us did. Men were expected to move a certain way, and anything outside of that became everybody’s business.
I could understand why he’d been nervous.
That didn’t mean I liked being kept in the dark.
“What about you?”
“What about me?”
“You ain’t care what people thought?”
Mace gave a humorless laugh. “I stopped caring a long time ago, but Sam didn’t.”
“So you hid because he asked you to.”
