AMAI
Ipulled through the gate first, watching it swing shut behind Truth and Raven’s beat-up cars in my rearview before I let myself exhale.
Three cars. Four women. One war that didn’t know how to stay in its lane.
I knew it would only be a matter of time before they came for Truth and my twins.
I tried to do it Truth’s way, and now it was time to do it mine.
I parked in the circular drive and got out, leaning against the door of my truck while I waited for them to catch up. Truth’s headlights swept across the front of the house as she pulled in behind me, and I watched as she leaned forward, taking it in. She hadn’t been here since her interview.
Raven got out first. Stood there a second with her hand still on the car door like her ass may have to take off running at any given moment.
“Lord have mercy.” She said it low, almost reverent, tilting her head back to take in the second floor. “This a house or a hotel?”
“It’s a house,” I said.
“It got a turret, Amai.”
“It’s not a turret.”
“It’s shaped like one.”
Honor climbed out next, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, even though the sun had already given up for the day. She didn’t say anything at first. Just walked a few steps onto the grass and looked up slowly, taking the whole thing in one level at a time like she was appraising it for auction.
“Okay,” she finally said. “Okay, okay, okay.”
Saroya was quieter about it, but I caught her eyes cutting toward the neighbor’s house—the one with the wraparound porch and the security gate dressed up to look like decoration instead of what it actually was—and then back to mine, doing the same math the rest of them were doing.
Truth got out last. She stood by her car door for a second, arms crossed over her chest, not moving toward the house yet.
I watched her face, waiting to see which way this was going to land.
Whether the size of it, the weight of it, was going to make her feel small in a way I didn’t want her feeling ever again.
“You good?” I asked.
“I’m processing.”
“Take your time.”
Raven wasn’t taking any time. She was already halfway up the front walk, craning her neck at the windows on the second floor like she was casing the place to rob me, but she hadn’t decided to commit yet.
“I would never leave,” she announced to no one in particular. “They’d have to drag me out. I’d be squatting. I’d fight the police.”
“Raven.”
“I’m serious, Truth. If this was mine, I’d change my name and start a new identity right here in this driveway.”
I almost laughed. Didn’t, because I didn’t want her to think I was laughing at her, but I filed it away—that easy, loud want she had for something bigger than what she’d been given—and hoped to God it was contagious.
Hoped some of it had rubbed off on her sister standing three feet away, still not moving, still deciding.
“Come on,” I said, holding my hand out to Truth. “Let’s get y’all inside before the mosquitoes figure out we’re standing still.”
She took my hand. That was enough for right now.
Inside, the house did what it always did to people seeing it for the first time—swallowed the conversation for a second while everybody’s eyes adjusted to the ceilings, the light fixtures, and the fact that sound moved differently in a space built with real intention behind it.
Honor let out a low whistle. Saroya just shook her head slowly, muttering something to herself that I didn’t catch.
“So,” I said, turning to Truth once the door shut behind us. “I’ve got people coming to break down the bed and discard it. The new one is being brought tonight and put together until I can order another custom one.”
“You’re just going to toss out a twenty-thousand dollar bed?”
“You don’t want to sleep in it, so what am I supposed to do with it?”
“Put it in another room, Amai.”
“Every room in this house has it’s own aesthetic. Nothing gets moved around from room to room.”
“I can’t believe how easily you just toss stuff out. You can donate it, Amai. Someone could use that bed.”
Honor’s head snapped toward me so fast her earring swung.
“Send it to my house,” she said immediately. “I don’t care whose ass been on it. Amai clearly took care of that thing—custom, right? That’s a quality bed. I could use a quality bed. Maybe that rich aura will rub off on Terrance broke ass.”
“Honor.” Truth said her name tired, the way you say a name when you’ve been saying it your whole life for this exact reason.
“What? I’m just saying. Waste not, want not.”
“It’s fine,” I said, and meant it, mostly because watching Truth’s face go from mortified to resigned was its own kind of entertainment. “Give me your address. I’ll have it delivered and set up.”
Honor blinked. “Wait—for real?”
“For real.”
“I was joking, Amai.”
“I wasn’t.” I shrugged. “Y’all are basically family at this point. Might as well start acting like it.”
That landed somewhere in the room and sat there a second, quiet, before Raven broke it by saying, “Family” under her breath, like she was trying the word on for size and deciding she liked it.
“Actually,” I said, before Honor could get too comfortable with the win, “I was going to have it tossed anyway, but Truth has helped me explore other options.”
“She has a way of doing that.” Raven laughed.
“Contrary to popular belief,” I said, cutting my eyes toward Truth for half a second, long enough for her to catch it and nowhere near long enough to explain it to the room, “I don’t have women at my house. Ever. This is new territory.”
Nobody needed the rest of that sentence spelled out. Saroya’s eyebrows went up. Raven’s mouth curved into something slow and satisfied like she’d just watched somebody score in overtime.
“So, that bed,” I continued, looking at Truth now, only Truth, “goes wherever you want it to go. Your house. Honor’s house. The dump. I don’t care. If getting rid of it makes you feel better, it’s gone tonight.”
Truth studied me for a second, arms still crossed, something working behind her eyes that I couldn’t quite name yet. “I’m cool with it going to my sister’s house. Honestly.”
“Then that’s where it’ll send it,” I said.
“Well, while y’all get your sleeping arrangements together,” Honor cut in, already moving deeper into the foyer like she owned the place, “somebody show me where the bathrooms at, ’cause I gotta see if the toilet paper folds into a swan or something in a house like this.”
Raven laughed, loud and unguarded, the sound bouncing off ceilings that had never heard anything like it before tonight.
Saroya followed them, already pulling out her phone to text something to somebody—probably Delphine, probably lying about where they were.
I stood there for a second in my own front hall, watching my house fill up with noise it had never held before.
I didn’t hate it.
That scared me a little more than the war did.
I stood in the archway between the foyer and the kitchen, half-forgotten, while Honor narrated her tour of my own house back to Raven and Saroya like she was doing a walkthrough for a real estate listing.
“This the kind of kitchen where you cook, or the kind where you just look at it?” Honor asked, running her hand along the marble like she was checking it for authenticity.
They had no idea that just a few months back, a dead body was in there. Still pissed at Yaya for that shit.
“Both,” I said.
“Mm-hm. We’ll see.”
Raven had found the wine fridge built into the island and was crouched in front of it, reading labels out loud in a voice that made Saroya cackle.
Truth leaned against the counter, watching her sisters with an expression I hadn’t seen on her before—not the guarded calculation she wore around me most days, not the exhaustion of the last few weeks.
Just amusement. Unfiltered. Like she’d forgotten, for a minute, that we were all standing inside a house I’d bought specifically because it could be defended.
Somebody put music on from a phone, and Saroya started swaying to it while she scrolled through my cabinets looking for glasses.
Honor kept up a running commentary about everything she touched, and the sound filled up rooms that had only ever held the hum of the refrigerator and the click of my own footsteps.
I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
I’d lived in this house for years. I knew every creak in the floor, every angle a man could come through a window, every place a gun could be hidden in a drawer without my mama finding it during one of her surprise visits.
I knew this house the way I knew a body I’d have to defend.
What I didn’t know was what it sounded like with four women in it who weren’t afraid of anything in the room, including me.
Raven found a bottle of red she liked and held it up like a trophy. “This the good shit, or the shit you keep around for people you don’t like?”
“Depends on who’s asking.”
“I’m asking.”
“Then it’s the good shit.”
She grinned and started looking for a corkscrew.
Truth caught my eye across the kitchen with something soft and unreadable on her face, and I felt it—that thing I didn’t have a name for yet, sitting low in my chest, heavier than anything I’d carried out of that warehouse.
Was it adoration? Hope? Love? I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t want it to leave.
I’d grown up in a house bigger than this one.
Higher ceilings. More security. And it had never once sounded like this.
Winston didn’t do laughter that wasn’t strategic.
Mama laughed sometimes, but carefully, like she was checking the room first to see if it was safe.
Kaisen and I had learned early that affection came with terms attached, that love in that house was a transaction you had to earn and could lose without warning.
This wasn’t that.