27. Irrevocable Love #2
“You spent twenty years trying to become me. You wanted my family. You wanted my life. And after all that effort, you still ended up alone.”
Rage transformed her face. She couldn’t hide the hurt that crossed her face.
There it was, the real wound she carried.
Cameron came charging at me, and I sidestepped her and drove her directly through the dining room table.
Wood splintered beneath us, and the impact knocked the breath from both of our lungs.
For several seconds, neither one of us moved, but then I noticed we landed near her duffel bag and my heart hammered. Cameron was reaching for something, but every muscle in my body ached too painfully to make swift movements.
Kenya moved and kicked the duffle bag out of arm’s reach, but Cameron grabbed a pocket knife from her joggers. Her breath smelled like blood and desperation.
“You should’ve died instead.”
I got up, and she followed suit, approaching me with her knife. As she approached me with her knife, I knew one thing was certain: I would not let her make an orphan of my fuckin’ daughter. For years, I’d blamed myself.
For Xander dying.
For Charles leaving me.
For being weak enough to succumb to addiction.
None of it was my fault.
A burst of strength surged through me. I twisted her wrist, and the knife clattered across the floor. Then I punched her repeatedly as if I was Claressa Shields and I had something to prove.
I continued to drive her back with my blows through the dining room and into the living room until I slammed her ass through the giant front window overlooking Aunt Lorraine’s yard.
Glass rattled behind her, and as if the universe also wanted to take part in this great cleanse, the sky opened.
Rain lashed against the panes, and thunder rolled somewhere in the distance.
Cameron lay there covered in shards of glass and blood. Her chest was still moving, but she couldn’t move.
Staring at Cameron, I finally understood that everything she’d built her identity around was collapsing in real time. The lies and the obsession. The fantasy she’d nurtured for decades, none of it survived contact with reality.
She wasn’t stronger than us.
She wasn’t smarter than us.
She wasn’t the architect of some grand destiny.
She was just a lonely woman who spent her life chasing a family that never belonged to her.
Rain hammered against the windows as thunder rolled somewhere in the distance. The storm had fully arrived now, wrapping itself around Aunt Lorraine’s little house like it wanted a front-row seat to the ending. Kenya and I went outside to where Cameron lay with broken limbs.
Cameron’s chest rose and fell rapidly. Blood stained her lip, and her hair hung wildly around her face. Still, she stared at me with that same hatred.
“You think you won?” she asked.
Her voice sounded broken now.
I looked at her for a long moment.
Then slowly shook my head. “No. Winning would’ve been never meeting you at all.”
Something shattered behind her eyes. It was the last illusion, finally fading.
Me giving a damn must have been the last hope she’d been carrying.
For years, she’d convinced herself she mattered to my siblings.
That she was our rival and that she belonged in our story, but the truth was sadder than that.
She’d spent decades making herself the center of a narrative that was never hers.
Cameron screamed out in pain, but she couldn’t move. I stepped aside instinctively as a car sped down my aunt’s small neighborhood and hydroplaned around the curb, turning into the driveway entirely too fast. Without realizing it, Aunt Lorraine sped right into her driveway, crushing Cameron.
My stomach dropped. Beside me, Kenya froze. Neither of us moved or spoke as Aunt Lorraine’s car door flew open. The elderly woman stumbled into the rain, looking horrified.
“What happened? Did I just run over something?”
Kenya pointed below her as Aunt Lorraine drove around the car. Her voice cracked.
“Oh, my God. Your husband called me, Kenya, telling me everything about Cameron, so I was rushing home from Bingo to warn you she was coming.”
Kenya shook her head. “No need for the warning. She attacked Chanel.”
Aunt Lorraine wept for the monster she accidentally created and for the hurt her sister had caused. She felt the pain of losing a niece but told the police how Cameron was obsessed and was stalking her family. She also admitted to accidentally running over her.
For the better part of two hours, the police asked us to repeat our story, but they never made us come into the station because our stories all aligned. After 2 a.m., we all sat on Aunt Lorraine’s covered porch while rain continued falling around us.
The night felt colder now. Lorraine cried softly into a handkerchief and apologized over and over again.
Poor Aunt Lorraine kept crying. “I thought I was helping.” Her voice trembled. “I thought she deserved to know her sisters.”
The word sisters lingered in the air. The sound of that word was painful because the truth was complicated.
We could’ve been sisters. It was none of our fault that we ended up with a mom like Sharon.
All of the hell we had been through stemmed from a little girl who wanted to be loved and who turned from a little girl who grew into a broken woman, and somewhere along the way, that pain became everybody else’s burden, too.
Lorraine lowered her head.
“I’m so sorry.”
I believed my aunt was sorry because Lorraine, unlike Sharon, understood what remorse looked like. She carried it and owned it.
I reached over and squeezed her hand. The older woman immediately began crying again.
Beside me, Kenya wrapped an arm around my shoulders.
The familiar gesture settled something restless inside my chest. For years, I thought survival was an individual act.
I thought healing belonged to one person at a time.
I thought strength meant carrying things alone.
I was wrong.
Strength looked like family. Strength looked like two women standing together after every attempt to tear them apart had failed.
Eventually, Kenya and I stood; the rain had finally begun to slow, and dawn wasn’t far away.
We had to get home to the loves of our lives and our children.
A new day waited on the other side of the darkness.
As we walked back toward the car, our hands found one another automatically.
The way they always had and the way they always would.
Life had taken many things from YaYa and me.
It had taken innocence, time, and trust, but the one thing it never managed to take was each other.
And as Kenya squeezed my hand beneath the fading storm, I realized the truth that had carried our family through every tragedy, every betrayal, and every loss.
Some loves were temporary.
Some loves faded.
Some loves failed.
But the love between us as siblings was irrevocable.