27. Irrevocable Love
By the time Kenya and I reached Lorraine’s house, the sun had long since disappeared.
The neighborhood was quiet in the way only an older neighborhood could be.
It was the type of quiet where porch lights glowed softly against the darkness and wind chimes sang from somewhere in the distance.
Looking at the little white house sitting at the end of the street, nobody would have guessed that decades of destruction could somehow trace themselves back to this exact place.
I spent the whole five-hour drive over here going back and forth with Kenya about whether my mom’s sister meant any harm.
Alex looked through her financial records and found that she had sent Cameron small amounts of money.
She hacked her Venmo and saw the line item listed as ‘for lunch’.
All signs pointed to Aunt Lorraine just genuinely feeling bad for her niece, who Sharon threw out like week-old garbage.
There were no suspicious amounts of money wired.
No communication between Lorraine and Alan.
Our aunt probably believed she was helping ease an ache in Cameron’s heart when she unknowingly fed her obsession.
That was the thing I hated most about evil.
It rarely looked like evil. Of course, Cameron fooled our aunt; she fooled me, too.
Evil looked like college roommates who brought you coffee before class. It looked like a woman who held your hand while you cried. It looked like people who learned your favorite songs and remembered your birthday. It looked like Janessa. The thought made my stomach turn.
I stared at the front porch while memories I hadn’t thought about in years resurfaced.
I remembered all of the evenings we spent watching 106 & Park in our dorm room.
I remembered intense study sessions and movie marathon nights.
Janessa and I would have conversations at two in the morning.
There were several days when her face was the first I saw as she woke me from a nightmare to ask if I was okay.
All of my memories felt contaminated now. I felt poisoned, just like I realized that coffee had to have been.
“You good?” Kenya asked quietly.
No. I wasn’t good.
I wasn’t good when I lost my son, Xander.
I wasn’t good when Charles manipulated me.
I wasn’t good when Jared got shot.
And I definitely wasn’t good knowing that a woman I once considered a friend had been orchestrating pieces of my suffering for over twenty years. But I nodded anyway. Because sometimes surviving required lying.
“Yeah.”
Kenya looked at me, the same way only older sisters could. It was the kind of look was called ‘bullshit’ immediately. Still, she didn’t push. Instead, she reached over and squeezed my hand.
Then we waited for movement. We had decided we would stake out Aunt Lorraine’s place as long as necessary to wait out this bitch, but lucky for us, it didn’t take that long.
Twenty-three minutes later, headlights appeared at the end of the road.
A black sedan was pulling into the driveway.
Whoever was in the car didn’t move at first, but eventually I got a clear view of the driver through the window, and there she was.
Cameron.
For a second, I simply watched her. She looked tired. She didn’t look like the larger-than-life girl I knew in college. She looked thinner and a bit frail. Grief sat heavily across her shoulders.
Good. I wanted her to be tired. I wanted her to be grieving. I wanted her to feel a fraction of what she’d spent years giving everybody else. She was completely unaware, and her guard was down. She was loitering in the car.
Kenya looked at me.
“It’s time to move, you ready?”
I opened the car door. The cool night air hit my face immediately. “No.” I stepped onto the pavement. “But I’m done waiting.”
The back door wasn’t locked. Lorraine probably never imagined somebody would use her house as the final stop in a decades-long feud. Kenya and I entered quietly through the back. The house smelled like lavender and old books.
Family photographs lined the walls. There were tons of pictures of birthdays, graduations, and cookouts.
Anyone else would have told you this was typical for a home to have, but I realized what’s normal must have set Cameron off.
It signified the life Cameron spent years watching from the outside.
We moved through the dark house without speaking until we reached the living room.
Then we waited in silence. Minutes later, the front door opened, and footsteps entered. The duffel bag hit the floor.
“Aunt Lorraine?”
Cameron’s voice echoed through the house.
“Auntie?”
She sounded confused now and suspicious, as if she could sense someone was home.
She switched the light on. The room flooded with light.
And finally, she saw us. For one beautiful second, she froze.
Her face was drained of color, and I could see the air leave her lungs.
Kenya swiftly moved to the front door and stood in front of it, blocking her ability to run.
It was time for her to face the two women she’d spent decades obsessing over.
“Hello, Janessa.”
The name hit her like a slap.
I smiled. “Or should I call you Cameron?”
Neither of us looked away or blinked. The years between us suddenly disappeared.
Every single betrayal.
Every single lie.
Standing together in one room at one time.
“As soon as I realized it was you,” I said quietly, “I realized none of it was by chance.”
Cameron’s breathing quickened. Her eyes darted toward the door. I could see her trying to decide if she could take Kenya, but my sister’s Glock was already pointing at her.
“Run if you want to bitch, and I’ll blast a hole in your temple.”
Cameron faced me again, and I could still see she was calculating. She was trying to determine different exits and looking for opportunities to run.
I took a step towards her.
“My addiction wasn’t by chance.”
I took another step.
“Meeting and marrying your sick ass brother wasn’t by chance.”
I took one more step.
“Losing my firstborn wasn’t by chance.”
The tears filling my eyes weren’t sadness anymore. They were rage. Twenty years’ worth.
“You poisoned me, bitch.”
The words landed heavily between us.
“Baby Bear,” Kenya said softly. I looked toward my sister.
She already knew. She could see it all over my face.
“I can handle this for you.”
I nodded.
Never taking my eyes off Cameron.
“No need. I can dispose of trash on my own.” My voice came out calm.
“Handle your business, Channy.”
And the second those words left her mouth, Cameron lunged for the kitchen. The second Cameron bolted toward the kitchen, instinct took over. Years ago, I would’ve froze.
Years ago, I would’ve cried.
Years ago, I would’ve looked for somebody to save me.
Not anymore.
The moment she turned, I was already moving.
My shoulder slammed into her back hard enough to send both of us crashing into the kitchen island.
The impact rattled dishes in nearby cabinets and knocked a decorative bowl onto the floor, where it shattered.
Cameron recovered faster than I expected, but I wasn’t underestimating anything about this psychopath.
Crazy people usually fought harder because they had less to lose.
She swung first. Her fist caught the side of my jaw and snapped my head sideways.
Pain exploded through my cheek and I tasted blood immediately.
But I wasn’t tripping at the pain. Losing Xander taught me that pain made things simpler.
Pain gave me something to focus on. A growl escaped my throat before I drove my knee directly into her stomach.
Cameron folded. I grabbed a handful of her hair and slammed her face into the countertop.
I thrashed her forehead into the island once, twice, and then a third time for good measure. The granite cracked her lip open. Blood spilled all over my auntie’s counter.
Still, Cameron fought. Still, she scratched my face and tried to claw my eyes out, but I continued to throw blow after blow to her abdomen.
“YOU KILLED MY SON!” The scream tore from somewhere deep inside me.
I had spent years in therapy and grief counseling. I masked my sadness with anything I could get my hands on, pretending I was okay when she was the one who was the architect of my pain.
Cameron twisted violently and caught me with an elbow.
I stumbled backward. She grabbed a kitchen chair and launched it at me.
The wood exploded against the wall beside my head.
For a split second, we both stood there breathing hard.
We were both bleeding and panting, but this was far from over.
I couldn’t care less if we both died in this fight, but I was sure as fuck she wouldn’t be leaving here alive.
YaYa was watching and waiting to jump in, but I gave her strict instructions in the car to only jump in if she had a deadly weapon.
I could take an ass-whoopin’, hell, life had whooped my ass enough.
The kitchen already looked like a war zone.
Cameron laughed like a villain from a DC movie, and the sound made my skin crawl.
“You think Xander was the worst thing I did?”
The words almost paralyzed me, but I suddenly understood what she was trying to do.
She wanted me to be angry and emotional.
She wanted me to be reckless. She kept looking at her duffel bag, which told me she was trying to reach a weapon in it.
She wanted to spiral in the same way I programmed myself to in college.
But this time, I’d give her the opposite.
I wiped blood from my mouth, then I smirked back at her, the same smirk I learned from X, because I’d learned something from loving that man. He once told me monsters didn’t deserve mercy, and in this moment, I decided to adopt his same philosophy.
“You know what’s funny?”
I slowly rolled my shoulders. Ignoring the pain and the adrenaline.