Page 110 of Omar

"It'll hit you eventually. When it does, I'll be here."

I leaned my head against her shoulder. "I know you will."

Ray showed up that afternoon.

I was at Portia's house when it happened. Omar had taken me there after his meeting with Kadeem because the apartment didn't feel safe with TK still unaccounted for. Portia's house was Baptiste territory, familiar, protected.

The doorbell rang and Portia answered it. I was in the kitchen and I heard his voice before I saw him. That voice I'd grown up listening to, the voice that used to read me bedtime stories before my mother died, the voice that had told me to pack my things and get in the U-Haul when I was sixteen.

"I just want to see my daughter," Ray said from the doorstep.

Portia looked at me through the kitchen doorway. Her face was neutral, waiting for my decision. I stood up from the table and walked to the living room.

Ray was standing just inside the front door. He looked older than the last time I'd seen him. Thinner, greyer, his clothes hanging loose on a frame that used to fill doorways. His eyes found me when I came through the doorway and something in his face crumpled.

"Asha." His voice broke on my name. "Baby girl, I'm so sorry."

I stood in the doorway and looked at the man who'd traded me to Supreme to clear a debt. The man who'd introduced me to a fixer named Len who sat at our kitchen table and arranged my life like a business transaction.

"Why are you here, Ray?"

"I heard what happened. With Supreme. I had to make sure you were okay."

"You had to make sure." I crossed my arms. "You drove to Brooklyn, found this address, and came to Portia Baptiste's house because you had to make sure I was okay. Where was that energy three years ago?"

"Asha, please. I know I don't deserve to be here. I know what I did."

"You don't know what you did." My voice was rising before I could stop it. "You don't know the first thing about what you did because you never asked. Not once. Not one phone call asking how I was doing, how I was living, what my days looked like inside that apartment."

"I called. You didn't pick up."

"Because Supreme answered my phone, Ray! He screened everything. Every call, every text, every email. You think I was just ignoring you? I was being monitored twenty-four hours a day by a man who decided what I wore, what I ate, where I went, and who I spoke to. And you put me there."

Ray's hands were shaking at his sides. "He told me you'd be taken care of. He said it was an arrangement, a partnership. He said you'd have your own money, your own salon..."

"I had my own salon because I built it myself with money I skimmed from a household budget he controlled. Every dollar I saved was a dollar I stole from a man who would have killed me if he'd found out. That's what your arrangement looked like from the inside."

"I didn't know it was like that."

"What did you think it was like?" I stepped toward him. "You handed your daughter to a drug dealer to pay off a debt. What did you think the arrangement looked like? Did you think he was gonna marry me? Take me to dinner and buy me flowers and respect my boundaries?"

"He said..."

"He said what you needed to hear so you'd sign me over without a fight. And you did it. You sat at our kitchen table, the same table where Mama used to feed us, and you let a stranger sit there and negotiate a price for your daughter."

Ray's face was grey. His mouth was working but nothing was coming out. His eyes kept going to the floor, then back to me, then to the floor again.

"I had no choice, Asha. The money I owed..."

"You had choices." I was shaking now, my whole body vibrating with something I'd been holding down for three years. "You could have sold the house. You could have filed for bankruptcy. You could have gone to prison for the debt and I would have visited you every week and brought you food and told you I loved you because you would have been my father who made a mistake, not my father who sold his daughter."

"It wasn't like selling..."

"It was exactly like selling! Len sat at our table, drank our coffee, and told you the number. You agreed. You shook his hand. Then you drove me to Supreme's apartment, kissed me on the forehead, and left. You left me there, Ray. You walked out the door and you didn't come back."

The coffee mug on the counter was next to my hand. I picked it up and threw it. It sailed past Ray's head and shattered against the wall behind him. Portia's good china, pieces flying across the hallway floor. Ray flinched, his hands coming up to cover his face.

"Do you know what I did every night for three years?" My voice was cracking. "I performed. That's what he wanted. He wanted a woman who smiled at him, who laughed at his jokes, who sat on his bed and watched him touch himself and told him he was incredible. And I did it. Every single night. I smiled and I laughed and I made the right sounds because that's what kept me alive. That's what your arrangement cost me, Ray. Three years of pretending to be in love with a man who bought me like furniture."