Chapter Thirteen — Twist Four
Kamiko heard about the canceled wedding the way most of Atlanta did — from her phone, from Neveah bursting into her apartment three weeks into her self-imposed exile with a tablet already pulled up to a gossip site, from a headline that read KINGSTON HEIR CALLS OFF WEDDING TO BENNETT DAUGHTER AMID SCANDAL, ATLANTA'S POWER MERGER IN RUINS.
"He called it off," Neveah said, like that fact alone was supposed to fix something. "Kamiko, he called off the whole wedding."
"Good for him," Kamiko said, and meant it to sound harder than it came out.
She'd spent three weeks building a wall, brick by brick, out of every piece of evidence she'd ignored while she was falling for him — the silenced phone, the cash payments, the redirected meeting spots, four months of soon that had never once arrived on time to matter.
She was not going to let one canceled wedding knock the wall down.
A man calling off his own wedding wasn't an apology.
It was just the natural conclusion of a lie he could no longer sustain, dressed up to look like courage.
She held that wall for another two weeks, through a dozen texts from the new number he'd somehow gotten — she never found out how, though she'd later learn Ty had, in a fit of guilty conscience, handed it over — through flowers sent to Velvet that she made Big June return, through a single voicemail she listened to exactly once, at three in the morning, and then deleted before she could listen again and let herself believe it.
"I know I don't deserve five minutes," the voicemail had said.
"I'm not calling to get five minutes. I'm calling because you should hear it from me instead of a headline, and because you deserve to know that everything I told you — the way I felt, the way I looked forward to Tuesdays, all of it — none of that was a lie.
The name was the lie. Everything underneath it was the realest thing I've ever had with anyone. "
She wanted to believe it. That was the problem. She wanted it so badly it scared her, and fear, for Kamiko James, had always meant retreat.
The wall held until Ty showed up at Velvet.
He came alone, no bachelor party this time, sat at the bar during a slow Tuesday shift and waited, patient in a way that didn't suit him, until Kamiko came off the floor for her break.
He didn't try to charm her. He looked, for maybe the first time since she'd met him, genuinely uncertain of himself.
"I owe you an apology," Ty said. "A real one. Not the kind I usually give."
"You don't owe me anything, Ty. You were just his friend covering for him. I get it."
"That's not all I did," Ty said, and something in his face made her stomach drop before he even finished the sentence. "I need you to know the rest of it, because I think you deserve the whole picture, even if it makes me look worse."
He told her. All of it — how after that first night, Zaire hadn't just disappeared into his own life and let fate handle the rest. How he'd asked Ty, repeatedly, quietly, over months, to check in on her — not to spy, Ty was careful to say, watching her face for the exact moment that distinction would stop mattering — just to know she was safe, know she was okay, know if she ever mentioned him, know if the wall was cracking.
How Ty had done it because he loved his friend and thought he was helping, feeding Zaire little updates about her schedule, her moods, whether she'd been asking about him, all of it filtered back through a phone Zaire kept silenced specifically so nobody — not Sade, not his family, not Kamiko herself — would catch him checking it.
"He was managing me," Kamiko said slowly, the words tasting like metal. "This whole time. Even after I blocked him, even after I disappeared — he had you feeding him information about my life like I was a — a shipment he was tracking."
"It wasn't like that," Ty said, but he said it weak, because even he could hear how much it was exactly like that.
"Get out, Ty."
"Kamiko—"
"Get out," she said again, and this time her voice didn't shake at all, which was somehow worse than if it had.
She thought, that night, driving home with her hands steady on the wheel and her whole chest hollowed out, about every conversation she and Zaire had ever had — every laugh, every rooftop, every long drive with the windows cracked — and wondered, for the first time, how much of it had been real and how much of it had been a man who'd never once, in four months, let her have the upper hand in a story that had always, secretly, been his to write.
She didn't cry this time either. She was past crying. She was somewhere colder and more final than that.
She left the club that week — not just the shift, the whole job, the whole city block of her old life — and didn't tell anyone where she was going except Neveah, and even Neveah only got the broad strokes: I need to build something that's actually mine, somewhere nobody's tracking it for somebody else.