The Don’s Virgin Obsession

Chapter 1

Sade Bennett

SIXTEEN YEARS EARLIER…

“Nobody ever told me the truth… so I learned to survive without it.”

Icouldn’t believe that at sixteen, my mother would be dead… ruled a suicide.

And my white stepfather was taken in for questioning, only because my aunt knew something wasn’t right.

I could still hear her screaming.

“My sister would never hang herself! Black women don’t do that!” She shouted at the police, her voice raw, breaking through the house.

“He did it! He put that rope around her neck, you racist piece of shit!” she kept yelling.

I stood still through all of it.

Numb.

I was told my siblings—Antone, Anthony, and Jastasia—were on their way to pick me up. They were eighteen, twenty, and twenty-two. My aunt had already made up her mind to go to the police station herself.

They wheeled my mother out.

A white sheet covered her body.

That’s when it hit me.

Seeing her leave our house for the last time.

I ran to the kitchen and threw up, my body folding in on itself as everything I was trying not to feel came crashing in at once. I cried so hard I couldn’t breathe.

Just like that… she was gone.

Hands pulled me out of the house. It was my brother, Antone, guiding me outside.

Outside, I saw my stepfather.

The man who had been nice to me for four years. The man who took us on trips and shopping sprees that my father couldn’t afford. The man my mother chose… so she could fund her interior design business and live the soft life she wanted.

He didn’t say anything.

He just dropped his head.

And after that day…

I never saw him again.

He didn’t pay for her funeral. Didn’t check on me. Didn’t give me anything.

He just disappeared.

I was sent to live with my father, and my siblings scattered.

Estranged. Lost in their own lives. Making choices I couldn’t understand.

Kids. Toxic relationships. Acting like the home we came from never existed.

But I remembered.

So, at eighteen, I stepped into something I had no business trying to carry.

My mother’s company. Bennett Interiors.

I didn’t know what I was doing.

I just knew I had her name, and I refused to let it die with her.

I went to school for the degrees I needed. Ran her business. Lost clients. Learned. Rebuilt.

Over sixteen years, I turned something broken… into something real.

Something that could stand.

No man involved.

Not after what happened to my mother.

My siblings blamed her.

They said she shouldn’t have left our father, said she chose wrong. Said everything that happened was on her… whether it was suicide or not.

But I couldn’t think like that.

I loved my mother.

I was the baby.

And all I did was take what I saw…

The good. The bad. The choices she made chasing a certain life…

And I learned from it.