Chapter Eleven The Photo
It happened after the Baltimore fight — a win, his biggest purse yet, an afterparty at a rooftop bar full of people Mika didn’t know, congratulating a man she loved for something she’d watched him bleed for.
She’d stayed home; a law exam that was two days out and she’d promised herself she’d protect her study time no matter what, a promise Amir had encouraged and had told her mattered more than any party.
She was outlining a hypothetical about landlord negligence when Renee — of all people, Renee, who she’d barely spoken to in months — texted her a link with no caption at all.
It was a video, eleven seconds long, shot from a phone at the party.
Amir at the bar, Cherise leaning into him, her hand on his jaw, turning his face toward hers, her mouth against his for one full second before he pulled back, before his hand came up between them, before the confusion on his face registered on camera for anyone paying attention.
Nobody paying attention was paying attention to that part. By morning, the caption under every repost read some version of the same thing: Amir Owens caught kissing influencer Cherise Monroe. Meanwhile his girlfriend nowhere to be found.
Mika watched the eleven seconds seven times before her hands started shaking.
She watched the way Cherise moved with total confidence, like she’d planned every inch of it.
She watched Amir’s face after — stunned, then furious, mouthing something at someone off-camera.
She wanted, badly, for that furious face to mean what she needed it to mean.
She was too hurt yet to trust her own reading of it.
Nina called before Amir did, voice tight with a fury Mika had never heard from her before. “I was standing four feet away. I saw the whole thing happen before some idiot’s phone even came out. That girl planned it like a play. I need you to not spiral before you hear the rest of it.”
“I can’t talk right now, Nina.”
“I know. I just needed you to know somebody who was actually there, is on your side before the internet finishes deciding what happened for you.”
Mika hung up and sat very still in the middle of her apartment, the eleven seconds looping silently in her mind even with the screen dark, and felt something she recognized from childhood settle back into her chest like an old, unwelcome guest — the specific, hollowing certainty that whatever good thing she’d finally let herself hold onto was about to be taken, the way everything eventually was.
He called nineteen times before nine a.m. She let it ring out every single one.