Chapter Twenty-One
Sin
Trust the Process
“I appreciate your help so much,” I repeat for the tenth time to the young receptionist who was so easy to deceive I feel ashamed of myself.
I assumed this building, one of the most expensive addresses in DC, would have CIA trained front desk staff.
Instead, my prepared and rehearsed sob story fell on the most sympathetic, gullible ears. I didn’t even get to the end of my monologue before she was telling me the apartment number and that the person who lived there was away on extended travel.
“Wow, Casey, thank you so much. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t helped me.” I cast my stricken eyes downward and sniffle.
“Tomorrow’s my last day at this job, and they’ve treated me like shit so it’s my pleasure.” She hands me the key card she scanned for me. “And this might be the first time since I started working here that I actually helped someone.”
I smile weakly and take the key card back and make a mental note to wait until next week to come back and do the search. She said he’s not due back until after Labor Day which is next week. I’ll do it the Friday before I head to my parents for the long weekend.
I wonder what Kwame’s doing for it.
The thought comes to me unbidden, and I shake my head to clear it and step out into the brisk afternoon foot traffic along New York Ave back toward my car.
After everything that happened with Stephen, it shouldn’t have been so easy for Kwame to get under my skin.
Yet here I am, exhausted after a night of lying awake thinking about him.
When I managed to fall asleep, my dreams were plagued with the scenes from that night at his house. Everything was so vivid and visceral that when he groaned my name at the end, it jolted me out of sleep.
I fumbled in my bedside drawer for my magic wand and spent thirty minutes on the edge of release before I gave up.
I woke up before my alarm went off with whatever the woman’s version of blue balls is. I’ve been on the verge of tears all day.
There is only one cure for it.
Him.
But he had his dick in someone else’s mouth last night.
The thought makes me want to knock his teeth out.
I’ve never been in knots like this over a man.
I need someone to talk me off this ledge. I climb into my car and start the ignition. I wait for my phone to connect and then open my messages.
“I need to talk to you.” I hit send on the voice note to my best friend, Ediri. She’s in London and I can’t remember if it’s a four- or five-hour difference, but I pray I’ve caught her during the afternoon slump at her flower shop.
To stop myself from watching the screen of my phone, I rifle in my purse for a piece of gum. I’ve just popped it into my mouth when my phone rings. I answer it before it rings twice. “Oh, thank God you were free,” I say.
“Well, well, well. Now you need me, you remember I exist.” She shouts the last sentence and I turn the volume down on my phone.
“I’m sorry, Dins.” I use the nickname her family uses to remind her that she loves me. “I’m a bum.”
She snorts a laugh. “Yeah, you are. But you’re my bum, so I forgive you. What’s up?”
“I’ve been in a weird place since this move.”
“You can’t outrun a problem when the problem is you.”
“Kicking your girl when she’s down isn’t nice, Ediri,” I whine.
“I don’t want you to get too comfortable being down, Sin. You deserve to feel good about your life.”
I groan. “I know. I’m figuring things out and trying to get there again.”
“By writing an advice column for The Spectator?”
Self-pity momentarily forgotten, I bristle. “Why are you saying it like I work in a crack house?”
She sighs. “I just…I don’t understand why you quit your dream job to write…fluff, Sin.”
“It wasn’t my dream job. And this isn’t fluff. It’s…” I trail off unsure how to finish my sentence.
She lets out a long sigh, her voice softer when she speaks again. “You have all those awards. You were on one track, then all of a sudden, you made a U-turn. I’m glad Stephen is behind you, and if this is really where you want to be, I just hope you really know what you’re doing.”
“I do.” I speak with a confidence that’s nowhere near true. Desperate to move away from this topic, I steer us toward the smaller of the icebergs littering the sea of my life.
“I texted because despite everything I said about not wanting anything with anyone, I think I have feelings for Kwame.” I’d told her about the reunion with him when it happened.
The silence that follows my confession stretches so long I check the screen to be sure we’re still connected. We are. I put the phone back to my ear.
“Hello?”
“Sorry. I have died and am speaking to you from the beyond.”
I laugh at her dramatics. “Come on.”
“No, you come on. I’ve been team Sin and Kwame since you told me about him.”
“There is no Team Sin and Kwame,” I insist and ignore the way regret wraps itself around my heart.
She giggles. “There could be if you’d let it. I think he sounds like everything you deserve.”
“Funny how you’ve never expressed any of this before now.”
“Because I know how you are,” she retorts.
I snort in affront. “How I am?”
She sighs. “Sin, the minute I’d suggested it you would have found a million reasons why it would never work. And honestly, I’m not sure I’m convinced it would either.”
My heart kicks against my chest. “What? Why not?”
“Because you seem adrift. Working a dead-end job and keeping secrets from your family.”
“I’m allowed to keep things to myself,” I snap. But there’s a truth in her assessment that stings. “And it’s not a dead-end job. It’s a means to an end.”
“So, you feel ready for a relationship?”
“You’re getting ahead of yourself. And even if I was, I’m not sure if Kwame is single.”
“What makes you think he’s not?”
“I went to his house, unannounced and…”
“And? What happened?” she demands in the voice that earned her the nickname Captain when we were in college. “Spit it out, Sin.”
I cringe in anticipation of her reaction and just say it. “He was with another woman.” My voice loses a decibel with each word until all that’s left is a whisper. It doesn’t diminish the stab of jealousy that I can’t seem to control.
“Who is she?” she asks after nearly a minute.
I let out a harsh sigh and rest my head on the steering wheel. “I don’t know. He’s never mentioned anyone. He made it seem like he was single.”
And I told him I wasn’t interested. A pang of longing and sadness twists around the unspoken words I let die on my tongue.
“I’m going to Google him.”
“No, Ediri. You know how I feel about that.”
“Fine, I won’t tell you what I find.”
I scoff. “Google search results aren’t even reliable,” I warn.
“Hmmm” she drawls and then makes a series of tutting sounds.
“What?”
“Did you know—” she starts.
“Stop. I changed my mind,” I yell. “I don’t want to know.”
“Too late,” she quips. “Did you know that Kwame Dickson is a pretty common name? But none of the Facebook profiles seem like your guy. Who doesn’t have a Facebook account? That’s shady,” she sings and draws the last word out.
I don’t like how quickly her imagination is spiraling. “Maybe he doesn’t like social media.”
She swats my excuse away. “Only people with skeletons don’t have social media accounts.”
I drop my head into my hands, my remorse growing by the second. “He doesn’t suddenly owe me his secrets just because I’m jealous. It’s silly to feel that way when we’re just friends.”
“Maybe you should stop judging your feelings and listen to what they’re telling you.”
I drop my head into my hand. “I don’t want to have feelings for him.”
“And yet, here you are.”
I snort. “Not unless I choose to be. I just need to remember that.”
She’s still laughing when we say goodbye.
I pull out into traffic, lighter now that I’ve gotten all that off my chest.
Maybe too light.
I can’t seem to wrap my hands around anything. When I’m unmoored, I’ve found that the best thing is to surrender and drift.
As usual, my father’s voice plays in my head. The line between right and wrong is an ever fixed, binary line. There is no gray area.
It’s the moral code, hardwired by my upbringing, that drove my initial response to what I witnessed at Kwame’s house. All I could see was everything he hadn’t told me.
Now that the shock of it is wearing off, and I’ve trauma dumped on Ediri, the years of training and working as a journalist kicks in.
Not only do gray areas exist, they are extremely valuable and misunderstand.
It’s in the gray where every story finds its roots, its tension, and relatability and it is, ironically, where the truth distinguishes itself from fact.
And the truth is, I spent my morning casing a building I intend to break into and I have zero intention of telling Kwame about it.
I’ve always believed, despite my curiosity, that everybody is entitled to decide what to share and what to keep to themselves.
It’s not fair for me to expect Kwame to have divulged that he’s rich or that he’s getting his rocks off with someone else. I didn’t tell anyone what I was working on. Hell, I didn’t tell my parents that I know Kwame, or why I really moved back to DC.
The only deal breaker is if he’s involved in any criminality.
I may not know how he makes his money, but I’m a good judge of character, and even if he’s hiding things, there’s no way Kwame is a criminal.
Just a lying fuck boy who has become my sounding board and friend.
What the hell am I going to do?
The question answers itself as I pull up to the garage of my office building.
“You’re going to get to work, Sin. That’s what you’re going to do.”
I finally have a lead that will put me back where I belong and make everyone who’s ever doubted me or stabbed in me in the back choke on their words.
I turn my phone off and enter the iconic building that houses the offices of The Spectator.
The one-hundred-year-old inaugural front page of the paper is etched into a soaring glass wall that divides the building’s elevator banks.
The paper’s tag line, ‘Your voice in the dark,’ emblazoned and backlit, gives me a rush of pride every time I see it.
When I was a little girl dreaming of being a journalist, this was all I wanted.
I almost have it.
“Trust the process, stay the course,” I whisper to myself and walk to the elevator.