20. Chapter 20
Darius
The pen is steady in my hand, and that's the part I can't explain.
The form asks for my legal name. Darius Anthony Webb. It asks for the name of the inmate I'm visiting. I write Monica Webb in block letters, slow and careful, like the paper might reject it.
Half my life. That's how long it's been since I stood in the same room as the woman whose name I just wrote. I was a kid with a garbage bag of clothes and a caseworker whose name I never learned. She was in handcuffs.
The officer behind the glass slides the form back and tells me to empty my pockets. Phone, keys, wallet, gum. He looks at the gum a second too long.
"Cinnamon," I say. "You want one?"
He doesn't smile. I put it in the tray anyway.
***
The visiting room smells like industrial cleaner and old coffee. The tables are bolted to the floor. The chairs are plastic, the kind that dig into your back no matter how you sit, and I sit in one facing the door on the far wall and I watch it.
Eleven minutes. I count them on the clock above the door because there's nothing else on the walls to look at.
I should be running lines in my head. That's what I do. Before every press conference, every interview, every room I've ever walked into since I was sixteen years old, I script it first. I know my opener, my pivot, my exit. Claire calls it my armor. Jaylen calls it my act.
Sitting here, I've got nothing.
No script. No opener. No move three.
And for the first time in my adult life, that doesn't feel like a problem.
I press my thumb to Ethan's name on my forearm and leave it there. Thirty years of this habit, and the skin still doesn't show it. Some things you carry so deep they don't leave a mark on the outside.
He'd be twenty-eight now. He'd be giving me hell about being nervous in a plastic chair. You called 911, D. What else were you supposed to do? That's what I imagine him saying, anyway. I've been having that conversation with a ghost for so long I've memorized both parts.
The deadline is still hours away. Camille gave us until midnight. I've been counting on midnight.
We have time.
***
The door opens.
Monica Webb walks in, and I don't stand up. I don't know if I'm supposed to. I don't know the rules for this, and I've had thirty years to think about it.
She's smaller than I remember. That's the first thing. The mother I've been carrying around is built from one photograph and a courtroom and everything I needed her to be. In my head she's been life-sized since I was eight. Bigger than that. The size of everything that happened to us.
The woman crossing the room toward me barely comes up to my chest.
Gray facility shirt. Hair pulled back tight. She moves carefully, like she's learned not to take up too much space.
She reaches the table and we both hesitate. There's no protocol for this. I don't know if I'm supposed to hug her. I don't know if she wants me to. I pull out the chair across from mine instead, a small gesture, automatic, and she sits.
I sit.
Her hands fold on the table. They're shaking and mine aren't, and I don't know what to do with that either.
She looks at me the way I look at a route I've run a thousand times in my head but never actually run in a game. Like she knows every step and still doesn't trust the ground.
"You came," she says.
"I got your message." My voice comes out lower than I planned. "So yeah. I'm here."
She nods. Waits.
I look at the table. The metal has scratches in it, names and dates, people carving proof they existed into a place built to make them disappear.
Then I look up.
"I want to understand you," I say. It's not the speech I've been rehearsing in the car. It's quieter than that. "I've spent my whole life carrying a version of you in my head, and I need to know how much of it is true. That's all I've got right now."
Monica looks at me for a long moment.
"That's more than I hoped for," she says.
***
She talks for a long time.
She tells me about the night she left. The shift at the packing plant she couldn't afford to miss because we were two weeks from eviction.
The neighbor, Miss Dorothy, who was supposed to come over at eight and didn't, and how Monica made a choice at the door with her work shoes already on.
One night. A few hours. I was responsible. I was always responsible.
She tells me about the years before that. Three jobs, as far back as my memory goes. My father was gone before I was old enough to keep a single picture of him in my head. The electricity getting cut in winter. How she used to put us to bed in our coats and tell us it was camping.
I remember the coats. I never knew it was the heat.
"I'm not telling you this so you'll feel sorry for me," she says. "I made the choice. I walked out that door. Whatever I was up against, I'm the one who left two boys alone in that apartment. I've had a long time to sit with that, and I'm not going to hand you excuses and call it the truth."
Her hands are still shaking.
"I just needed you to know I wasn't out having fun. I wasn't out forgetting you. I was trying to keep the lights on, and I gambled with the wrong thing, and I lost everything." Her voice catches. "I lost him. And then I lost you."
I keep my eyes on the table.
"Darius."
I look up.
"Let me ask you something," she says. "Then you can ask me anything you want, or you can leave, and I'll understand either way."
She takes a breath like it costs her.
"Did you get the birthday cards? All those years." Her eyes fill. "Do you know I love you?"
The question lands in my ribs like a hit I didn't see coming.
"I got them," I say.
Her face changes. Hope. Actual hope, naked on her face, and I have to look away because of what I'm about to say next.
"I kept them. Every one." My thumb finds Ethan's name on my arm and presses down. "A whole shoebox. Yellow tape holding it together. I moved that box to nine cities."
I stop. Make myself finish.
"I never opened most of them."
The room is quiet except for a vending machine humming against the far wall.
She needs to know the rest of it.
"I blamed you for me being alone," I say. "Every day since I was eight years old. And you were in here writing me birthday cards."
Monica's face breaks open. There's no other way to say it. All those years of holding still, and it cracks down the middle right in front of me, and she puts her hand over her mouth and cries without making a sound, the way you learn to cry in a place like this.
Something breaks in me too.
I don't cry in the visiting room. I'm close.
Closer than I've been since my brother's funeral.
My hand moves an inch across the table toward hers before I know I'm doing it.
Then I catch the officer by the door and pull it back.
We're strangers with the same last name.
Touching her would be a lie about where we are.
So I just stay. I keep my eyes on her instead of the table, and we sit like that until her shaking stops.
"I kept them," I say again. "But every time one showed up, I felt like shit.
It was supposed to be birthday parties like the rest of the kids got.
Instead I got a day-old cake with my name spelled wrong half the time, and a card from a prison.
" I stop. Make myself finish. "But when that card came, I still knew. "
She wipes her face with the heel of her hand. "Knew what, baby?"
"That you were still alive."
***
When the officer calls five minutes, Monica sits up straighter. She takes a breath. Sets her hands flat on the table like she's bracing for something.
"There's one more thing," she says. "And I'm sorry it took me this long to give you even this much."
She looks at me directly. No buildup, no softening. Whatever this is, she's been practicing it.
"Your father." A pause. Long enough that I feel it in my chest. "I don't know where he is. I stopped looking a long time ago." Another pause. "But you deserve what little I have."
Her eyes hold mine the whole time.
"Robert. His name is Robert. He was from Memphis, originally."
The words land and just sit there.
Robert. Memphis.
A first name and a city.
I've waited thirty years for this, and it fits in one sentence.
"That's all I know," she says. "I wish it were more."
I sit with it for a second. The smallness of it. The fact that a man who helped make me is somewhere I can find on a map, and that's all she has, and she's been holding even that back. Not out of cruelty. Out of not knowing what it would do to me.
"It's more than I had this morning," I say.
The last name I already carry. Webb. She gave me his name and he never came back for either of us.
I don't have a notebook. Claire would have a notebook.
So I borrow the marker hanging off the visitor sign-out clipboard and I write it in the palm of my hand — Robert Webb, Memphis — pressing hard enough to feel it, because I need to hold onto it even for a few minutes. Even just across a parking lot.
Monica watches me do it and almost smiles. "You used to write on your hands in grade school. Spelling words."
"I failed spelling."
"You did." The smile lands for real this time, small and worn. "You were better at running."
The officer calls time. She stands, and I stand, and there's a second where neither of us knows the rules for this.
"I'll come back," I say.
She nods like she's afraid to believe it. Then she walks to the door, and right before she goes through it she turns around.
"I watch your games," she says. "Every one they let us see. I tell everybody in here. That's my son."
The door closes behind her.
***
The sun outside is too bright after that room.
I stand on the pavement and let my eyes adjust. Palm closed around a name I've waited my whole life for. Midnight still hours away. We have time. That's the thought I keep coming back to — we still have time.
Then I see her.
I stop walking.
Claire is leaning against my car. Coat on, notebook in hand, hair pulled back the way she wears it when she's working.
She shouldn't be here. I didn't ask her to come. I hung up on her in a stairwell and walked into a prison, and she had a sponsor crisis and a briefing and a hundred reasons to stay at that summit.
She's leaning against the hood like she's been waiting a while. Not on her phone. Not checking her watch. Just standing there, coat buttoned wrong at the top, notebook hanging from one hand, eyes already on me.
I walk toward her and I can't explain what happens in my chest.
My whole life, I've known the math on people. They leave. The caseworker drives away. The foster family sends you back. You perform well enough and they keep you around for a while and then something shifts and you're in another bag in another car and you start over.
Claire came anyway. No one asked her to. She just came.
I open my hand and show her the palm.
She looks at the name. Then up at my face.
"I want to find my father," I say.
The words come out steadier than I expect.
She doesn't immediately start making a list or pulling out her phone. She doesn't tell me all the reasons it might be difficult. She just stands there and lets me have the moment.
"Will you help me find him?"
Claire doesn't hesitate.
"Yes."
Just yes.
Something inside me eases.
Before I can stop myself, I pull her into my arms. She lets out a surprised sound as I lift her off the ground, and for the first time all day I don't care who's watching. I don't care about cameras or reporters or whether somebody snaps a picture and turns it into tomorrow's headline.
When I finally set her down, she's smiling.
"We'll figure it out. Records searches. Public databases. I know people. We can start tonight if you want."
"Tonight we've got Camille," I remind her.
She immediately shifts into work mode. One second she's Claire. The next she's Claire Wells, crisis manager.
"The deadline isn't until midnight," she says, already moving toward the passenger door. "We still have time. We get back, call Brandon, finish your statement, and get ahead of this before she makes a move."
I nod.
For the first time all day, I believe that.
Maybe Camille overplayed her hand. Maybe we can get ahead of this. Maybe this thing isn't going to end as badly as I thought.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
I pull it out without thinking. The screen lights up with a notification.
Then another.
Then a third.
I stop walking.
Claire reaches the passenger door before noticing I've gone quiet.
"Darius?"
I don't answer.
My eyes stay fixed on the screen as another notification appears. I've been famous long enough to recognize the feeling that settles in my stomach when this starts happening. Most days, a notification is nothing. A teammate sending a joke. A reporter looking for a quote.
This is different.
The alerts keep coming. One after another. Fast enough that I can barely read them before the next one appears.
Claire is beside me now.
"What happened?"
I look down at the headline.
The Truth About Darius "Hollywood" Webb's Engagement
Published Four Minutes Ago
Four minutes.
Camille gave us until midnight.
We built an entire strategy around midnight. We still had hours.
Claire takes the phone from my hand. The silence stretches as she reads.
"No."
The word is barely audible.
I look over at her. The color has drained from her face. And suddenly I understand what she's already figured out.
There was never a deadline.
The meeting wasn't a negotiation. The twenty-four hours weren't real. Camille never intended to wait. While Claire and I were standing in this parking lot talking about my father and making plans and convincing ourselves we still had time, she'd already made her move.
Another notification appears.
Then another.
Then another.
I don't need to open them to know what's happening.
The story is spreading.
And for the first time since this whole mess started, I have absolutely no idea what we're supposed to do next.