Page 34 of When Love Takes Root

It wasn’t confusing.

It was inconvenient.

I met her at a café with cameras, witnesses, and enough daylight for foolishness to feel unwelcome. She sat across from me, wearing the perfume I used to buy her and a face prepared for mercy. Her hair was sleek again. Edges perfect. Nails done. Eyes shining. The presentation had been repaired.

The trust hadn’t.

“Don’t put my name on a child your choices created,” I said.

Domonique cried harder.

I didn’t.

That surprised me at first.

Then I understood.

Grief had already left by the time the truth arrived.

When the baby came, the truth had cheeks, eyes, and Kacey’s whole damn face. Same narrow chin. Same heavy lids. Same little crease between the brows like he’d entered the world already suspicious of accountability. I saw one picture and felt no shock. No jealousy. No wound reopening. Just a tired confirmation in my chest. The child was innocent. He didn’t owe me anything. He hadn’t betrayed me. But he wore his father’s face so plainly that every lie Domonique had tried to place in my lap looked foolish beneath hospital lights.

I thought about every time I had protected myself, every barrier I had refused to remove, every moment Domonique mistook for distance when it was really discernment. I thought about how my spirit had been telling the truth long before my heart stopped arguing. There are blessings that come wrapped in denial, and sometimes the mercy is not that God keeps you from the fire. Sometimes the mercy is that He makes sure you don’t smell like smoke when you walk out.

The bag swung back toward me, and I tapped it with my glove.

Juice stood beside me now, close enough that his shoulder almost touched mine.

“I told you Kacey was funny,” Juice said.

“You tell me everybody funny.”

“Because people be funny,” Juice said. I looked at him. He shrugged. “But I especially told you he was funny.”

“You did.”

“I ain’t even saying that to be right.”

“Yes, you are.”

“A little bit,” Juice admitted. I laughed. He smiled, then looked at the old photograph of Pops on the shelf. “Uncle Jeremiah would’ve been proud you walked out.”

“I think about that more than the punch,” I said.

“The punch was beautiful though,” Juice said.

“Justice.”

“I’m just saying. From a technical standpoint,” Juice said.

I shook my head.

Juice picked up the mitts from the shelf and slipped them onto his hands. “Come on.”

I looked at him. “You in loafers.”

“I’m also gifted,” Juice said.

“You’re about to embarrass yourself.”