Chapter Fourteen A Knock at the Door
The knock came on a Sunday, two months after the video, while Mika was at Amir’s new place — a townhouse in Fairmount he’d bought with the Baltimore purse, modest by boxing-star standards but a mansion compared to anything either of them grew up in — helping Nina test recipes for Pop’s birthday dinner.
It had been, up until that Sunday, one of the easiest stretches of Mika’s life.
The therapy was working, slow and unglamorous as it was.
Nina had started teaching her to cook the recipes Pop guarded like state secrets.
She’d been offered a summer fellowship at the housing nonprofit she’d interned for, a real foothold into the exact career she’d been building toward since she was twelve years old watching a couch get carried to a curb.
For the first time in a long time, she finally felt like the ground under her might actually hold.
Mika opened the door expecting a delivery. She found her mother instead.
Gwen Bryant stood on the stoop in a coat two sizes too big, looking older than Mika remembered, and behind her, hands jammed in his pockets, stood Mika’s younger brother Dayvon, twenty now, with the same restless, hungry look he’d had at fourteen when he first started running with the wrong crowd.
“There she is,” Gwen said, like no time had passed, like the last real conversation between them hadn’t been a screaming match four years ago over money Mika didn’t have and Gwen wouldn’t stop asking for. “Look at you. All grown.”
“Mom.” Mika’s stomach dropped straight through the floor. “What are you doing here?”
“Can’t a mother see her daughter?” Gwen’s eyes moved past Mika into the house, cataloging — the hardwood floors, the art on the walls, the general unmistakable smell of money — with a hunger Mika recognized instantly and hated herself for recognizing.
“Heard you doing real good for yourself. Heard you got yourself a boxer.”
Behind her, Nina appeared in the hallway, took one look at the scene, and went very still.
“How did you find this address,” Mika said, not a question so much as a demand.
“Dayvon’s friend does security at one of them boxing gyms,” Gwen said, like that was a perfectly normal answer, like showing up unannounced at her estranged daughter’s boyfriend’s house was a thing families just did. “We just wanted to see you. That’s all. See how you living now.”
Mika knew, with a certainty that settled cold and heavy in her stomach, that this was not about seeing her.
This was about seeing what she had.