“I hid because I loved him.” Mace looked down at his hands before continuing. “If keeping that shit between us made it easier for him, that’s what I was gonna do. I ain’t need anybody else knowing what we had for it to be real.”
I sat there quietly, watching him struggle to keep the grief from taking over his face.
For the first time since Sam died, Mace wasn’t pretending he’d only lost a friend.
“I knew something was wrong with you,” I said. “I just thought…”
“You thought I had something to do with what happened.” It wasn’t a question and I knew it.
“Shit, I didn’t know what to think.”
Mace slowly nodded. “I get it.”
“And you acting nervous about the phone didn’t help.”
“You think I wanted you going through pictures and messages that were only supposed to be between us?”
“No…”
“I knew you’d find out eventually. I just wasn’t ready for this shit.” His voice cracked before he cleared his throat. “That phone is all I got left of him that nobody else shared.”
There it was… The pain he’d been carrying alone while everybody else grieved openly.
My aunt had been able to cry over her son. I’d been able to bury my cousin and promise revenge. Mace had stood beside us pretending his loss didn’t cut deeper than friendship because nobody knew he’d lost the man he loved.
That shit couldn’t have been easy.
“I don’t give a fuck who you love,” I told him. “Never did.”
“I know.”
“You should’ve known you could tell me.”
Mace looked at me for a second before nodding. “I know… I was just trying to protect him. He didn’t want nobody to know.”
Neither one of us spoke for a while. There was still too much sitting between us, but anger didn’t feel as important now that I understood why he’d been hiding.
I looked down at Sam’s phone. “Did you know what he was investigating?”
Mace’s expression changed as he answered with, “I knew he was looking into something, but he wouldn’t tell me everything.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
“You just read our messages. Did it look like Sam told me everything?”
I couldn’t argue with that. Half their conversations were Sam getting irritated because Mace shut down or Mace telling him they’d talk later.
“What did he tell you?”
Mace leaned back and stared toward the ceiling like he was deciding where to begin. “A few weeks before he died, he started asking weird questions to his mama about your mama. At first, I thought he was doing it because he heard something from youraunt. Then he started digging through old records and looking for people who knew her before she got sick.”
“What kind of records?”
“Medical. Property. Some police shit from back then.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. He just said something didn’t add up, but he never told me what.”
