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“I can’t believe him though. How you keep a lie going for that long? He gotta be over there dropping off major bread to the other woman because it’s no way she allowed her son to be a secret for 14 years. You know these Miami bitches would have been came to the wife and exposed that secret. He calculated just like Emaye said, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he made her sign an NDA or some shit. I’m good off that nigga for a little while though. Shit ain’t a good feeling to hear your mama cry like that. I damn near started shedding tears with her,” Demarco went on to say. I left it at that, not saying anything else to him after that.

We sat in silence for well over thirty minutes. I was the one to get up first, telling Demarco that I was going to head upstairs to check on our mom. I wanted to see what she was doing.

I knew she didn’t like for us to go upstairs with our shoes on, so I stepped out of my slides, leaving them at the bottom of the steps. I jogged up, taking two steps up at a time.

I walked down the long hallway that led to their master bedroom. The double doors were closed. I thought it would be locked, but I was able to walk right in.

I knew she was still crying because I heard the cries outside of the door. She was in bed, lying on her side of the bed. Her body was turned on her side, holding a tissue in her hands, as she cried the kind of cry that sounded as if she was hyperventilating.

I walked over, siting on the side of her, putting my hand on her hip.

“You… you.. probably.. think I’m weak,” she got it out to me.

“Nah. I actually don’t. I never thought you were weak. All that fuck shit that that nigga has done to you over the years, I’ve never viewed you as weak. I always looked at you as a woman that loved her husband and had thoughts of the nigga one day getting his shit together. You birthed and raised four boys. How could I ever view you as weak?” I asked her.

She continued to lie there and have her moment. I gave her that safe space, where she could do it too. Never made her feel like she had to stop crying over a man that hurt her this way. Never made her feel like she was giving her tears to the wrong nigga, either. I couldn’t relate, but I could sympathize. I knew she had to be hurting. It couldn’t be a good feeling to give someone everything, and they mishandle you, breaking you into pieces like this.

Her tears were warranted, and if she wanted to sit up here, and cry over this nigga for the next two hours, or however long that she needed to get it out of her system, I was going to let her do that.

Maybe fifteen minutes later is when she stopped crying. She lay there with red eyes, and a red nose. Her eyes were puffy a little bit from all the crying she’d just finished doing.

“You know you don’t gotta stay here tonight. Pack a bag and come with me. If you stay here, you going to keep getting triggered, and keep crying,” I suggested, wanting her to get the fuck out of this house, and just come home with me.

“I need to rest. It’s after three in the morning, and I haven’t been to sleep,” she told me, and I nodded my head.

“You going to ask for a divorce for real?” I wanted to know.

“Yes. I meant that. I wouldn’t even be able to love him the same. I have to find a good lawyer. I don’t want anything that he has. I’m not coming after his money, his business, this home, none of those things. I just want out,” she said.

“You going to forever be straight. You got four sons. You know we got you,” I assured her.

After that, I leaned over, so I could place a couple of kisses on her face. By no means did I consider myself a mama’s boy, but I overly loved my mom. I had nothing but the upmost respect for her too. When I think of all the milestones that I’ve ever had in my life, dating back to me being a little ass boy, she’s always been there. The way she loved me, and my brothers. The way she poured into us, even when the glass that she was pouring from wasn’t always full. That’s something that’ll pull you in and never make you stop loving her.

“What kind of crib you want? You want something big like this, or you want a penthouse like me? What you want, beautiful? I can have you in it tomorrow,” I said, and for the first time since I’ve been here, she gave the closest thing to a smile to me.

“I don’t know, son. I’ll tell you in the morning,” she replied.

I wasn’t used to her sounding like this. She sounded as if that nigga had sucked the life out of her. She was usually the kind of person to always talk to you with a smile on her face, and even if she was hurt behind something that he might have done to her, you wouldn’t know because she never showed it. Every ounce of hurt that she was feeling tonight, you could see it. It weighed heavy on the way she was talking, plus the drained look in her eyes.

After twenty minutes or so, she ended up falling asleep. She was a light sleeper, and even though she found out all this shit tonight, she was still able to rest peacefully.

I sat here, staring at her, as she slept. Not long after, my phone began to ring in my pocket. I pulled it out, seeing that Deja was calling me via Facetime. All this shit that just happened in the last hour, it didn’t even hit me that Deja never responded back to my text message, when I asked her how everything had been going at work.

It was after three, and she’s usually home by this time. I knew she wasn’t home because I didn’t get any alerts to my phone from the camera app, letting me know that there was motion at the crib.

I went ahead and accepted the call. The second our eyes locked, she had the same red eyes that my mom just had before she fell asleep.

“What’s up? Why you crying?” I asked her.

The second I asked that, a couple of tears fell. I could tell that Deja was getting comfortable with me because she tried to play big gangsta all the time and didn’t really like to show her emotional side to everyone.

I was trying to pay close attention to her surroundings, but I couldn’t really see. There was just a white wall behind her. She had a hoodie pulled over her head, and her makeup from work was still on her face.

“My little sister… she tried to kill herself tonight,” she damn near whispered it when she said it.

I expected Deja to say a lot of things to me in response to me asking her why she was crying, but I didn’t think that she was going to drop this bomb on me. I knew how much she loved her little sister, Nari. She’s talked about her to me on a few occasions, and every time Deja spoke on her, she would light up. She’s been telling me that Nari was going through postpartum depression, and how she couldn’t wait to get the bubbly version of her sister back.

“Damn, baby. I’m sorry. Is she okay? Where are you right now?” I asked.