TRUTH #3
“You sure they got that test right?” he asked instead, eyes on the road, voice tight.
“I looked at those results so many times I probably could recite them in my sleep.” I dug my nails into my palm. “Two separate sacs. Two babies. Two fathers. It’s not a mistake, Amai. It’s not a mix-up. It’s real.”
He didn’t say anything. He just let out this long, heavy breath through his nose, like the weight of it was physically settling into his chest, crushing something on the way down.
“Promise me you won’t kill him,” I said.
His head snapped toward me so fast I flinched.
“Promise me,” I said again, steadier this time. “I mean it, Amai.”
“You really about to sit here and ask me that? After what he just said to you? After what he’s been saying?”
“I’m asking you anyway.”
He gripped the steering wheel like he wanted to rip it clean off the column, knuckles going pale, jaw ticking.
“Fine,” he finally bit out. “I promise. But I ain’t about to sit around while you cry over your sorry-ass baby daddy like Keisha on The Chi.
As long as he stays in his lane, I’ll leave him alone. The second he don’t—”
“He knows where I stand,” I cut in. “I already told him. I’m with you. That’s not changing. The only thing me and Kaisen got is co-parenting. Nothing else. He needs to respect that, and so do you.”
Amai’s eyes flicked to me, something unreadable moving behind them. “So, he gon’ be at the doctor’s appointments now? Both of us just—taking turns showing up like some blended-family sitcom?”
“No.” I said it flat, no room to argue. “The only appointment either of you is coming to is the next one—when I get the ultrasound. After that, I’m going alone.
Every time. Because I’m not about to keep dragging myself and these babies through the two of y’all’s bullshit every single visit.
My blood pressure can’t take it, and frankly, neither can my patience. ”
“Truth—”
“I mean it, Amai.” I looked straight ahead, out the windshield, done entertaining his face. “This is not a negotiation.”
He didn’t answer right away. I felt him staring at the side of my face, felt the tension radiating off him like heat off asphalt in July, but I didn’t turn to meet it. I’d already given enough ground today. This piece, I was keeping for myself.
He drove for another ten minutes without saying a word, and I let him.
The silence between us had settled into something less sharp—still loaded, but the edges had dulled.
Outside the window, New Orleans blurred past in the way it always did at dusk: gold light catching the iron lacework on the old buildings, the live oaks throwing long shadows across the neutral ground, the city putting on its evening face like it was getting dressed for something. I watched it instead of watching him.
He turned onto Magazine Street and slowed, pulling into a narrow space in front of a building I’d passed a hundred times and never really looked at.
The storefront was dark glass and brushed bronze, understated in the way that only very expensive things are understated.
No flashy signage. Just the name etched in the glass in clean, serif letters: LANDRY NOIR.
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
Amai put the truck in park and looked over at me like the answer was obvious. “This is my store.”
I turned back to the window. Looked at it again. “Your store.”
“I design custom pieces. High-end clientele.” He said it like he was reporting the weather. Like this was information that required no fanfare.
“Amai.” I turned to face him fully. “You finally brought me to your infamous jewelry shop, huh?”
“It’s been so hectic I just didn’t have the time.”
“Better late than never I guess. Let me find out my baby daddy the Harry Winston of New Orleans. I learn something new about you almost everyday.”
Something shifted in his expression—not quite a smile, but the cousin of one. “There’s a lot you still need to learn about me, Truth.” He opened his door and came around to my side before I’d even unbuckled my seatbelt. He held his hand out. “Come on. I’ve got good parts too.”
I looked at his hand for a beat longer than necessary, then I took it.
The alarm gave a low, descending tone when he punched the code, and then the store breathed open around us—that particular hush of a space that exists outside of time, where the only thing that matters is the thing behind the glass.
He hit a panel near the door, and the interior lighting rose slowly, warm and directional, designed to make everything it touched look like the center of the universe.
He was right. It was good.
The showroom was long and narrow with a high ceiling, the display cases running in parallel lines down the center, more pieces mounted on backlit panels along the walls.
I stepped away from him without thinking and just walked.
He let me. He stayed near the entrance, one hand in his pocket, watching me move through his space with the same quiet attention he gave everything.
The first case I stopped at held a collar necklace—eighteen-karat rose gold, set with alternating round-cut rubies and champagne diamonds in a repeating starburst pattern that looked like it had been designed for someone who had decided, once and for all, that they were done being quiet.
I pressed my fingertip to the glass above it.
“That’s for a client in Houston,” Amai said from across the room. “She wanted something that announced her before she walked into the room.”
“She’s going to get what she paid for.”
I moved to the next case. A men’s chain in oxidized white gold, heavy and deliberate, the links asymmetrical in a way that looked effortless but had clearly been agonized over.
Past that, a pair of earrings that were less jewelry and more architecture—long, articulated drops in yellow gold that moved in sections like vertebrae, each segment set with a princess-cut emerald.
They looked like something that would make a room go quiet.
Then I found the piece that stopped me entirely.
It was a bracelet. Wide cuff, platinum, the surface engraved with a pattern so fine it looked like smoke caught and suspended in metal.
Set flush into the surface were seven stones—no prongs, no bezel, just the stones embedded in the metal like they’d grown there—and they were a color I didn’t have a name for.
Not blue. Not gray. Not violet. All three, at once, shifting when I tilted my head.
“Alexandrite,” he said. He’d moved without me hearing him, and he was closer now, not quite behind me but near enough. “Color-changing. Those are untreated stones from Russia. Cut for that bracelet specifically.”
“Someone commissioned this?”
“I made it because I wanted to. Sometimes I make things just to make them.”
I looked at him over my shoulder. He was watching the bracelet, not me, his expression held admiration for the work of his hands.
“Come to the office,” he said.
His office was in the back, behind a door that looked like part of the wall.
Inside it was sparse and deliberate—a long black desk, bookshelves lined with design references and gemological texts, a drafting table with a light pad built in, sample stones organized in shallow trays by color and cut.
His laptop sat open on the desk, the screen dark.
He went around to his side without sitting, woke the machine, and turned it toward me.
“Sit,” he said, and then corrected himself, pulling the chair out. “Please.”
I sat.
The screen showed a 3D rendering program, and in the center of it, rotating slowly on a dark background, was a ring.
I didn’t say anything for a long moment.
The center stone was pear-shaped, large enough to command the entire composition, and it was not white.
It was not colorless. It occupied a color category so rare that most people went their entire lives without ever seeing one in person—a fancy vivid pink-orange diamond, that precise, fiercely saturated range that the GIA certified in fewer than a handful of stones per decade.
The cut was custom, slightly elongated from a standard pear, and the facets had been mapped so that light exited in a spray pattern from the point, spreading upward through the stone like fire pushing through a crack.
Flawless clarity. The saturation was even and deep all the way through—no windowing, no extinction, no dead zones. Seven carats. Natural. Untreated.
The setting was where it got complicated.
There were no prongs. Instead, the stone floated inside a framework that reached up and curled inward in a way that protected it on all sides while leaving it exposed from above and below, so light could move through from any direction.
The metal was split-shank, rose gold on one side and white gold on the other, the two colors twisting together at the base of the setting before separating again to form the band, which tapered and curved to a slight point at the back.
Pavé diamonds ran the interior of the split—tiny, colorless, perfectly matched—so that when you looked at the ring from below, there was a river of light running underneath the colored stone.
Like it was being lifted by something invisible.
The wedding band rendered beside it was white gold, curved to nest against the engagement ring exactly, its inner surface engraved with something I couldn’t read at this scale.
I leaned forward. He must have anticipated that, because he reached past me and zoomed in on the band.
Even when you don’t see it.
I sat back.
“Amai.”
“I’ve been working on that design for three months.
” He wasn’t looking at the screen. He was looking at me.
“Since before your sisters came. Before the ultrasound. Before any of it.” He paused.
“I wasn’t trying to impress them. I wasn’t trying to impress you.
I made it because I couldn’t not make it. ”
“That’s—” I shook my head. “That’s a lot.”
“I want you to be my wife.”