Chapter Fifteen The Door Opens
“As a mother… as a woman… how?”
Keisha shifted in the doorway, towel slipping from her damp curls, the silence pressing heavy between them.
Marcus stood behind her, his mouth slightly open, like words were trying to find their way out. But Sunni didn’t look at him.
Not yet.
Her eyes were on Keisha.
The woman. The mother.
“I ain’t come to tear your house down,” Sunni said, her voice calm but laced with steel. “That ain’t why I’m standin’ here.”
Keisha swallowed. “Sunni, I didn’t—”
But Sunni held up her hand again. Quiet. Firm.
“I need to ask you somethin’. Not as a wife. Not as his past. But as a mother. As a woman.”
Keisha didn’t respond.
Sunni stepped closer. Her voice didn’t raise—it lowered, made you lean in.
“I need to know something,” Sunni said. “When you looked me in my face that first day—when you told me he was alive—were you telling me everything? You really didn’t know about me? About my babies?”
Keisha’s eyes filled immediately, but she didn’t look away.
“No,” she said. “I knew nothing. He told me you were dead. He never told me there were five children waiting on him. I found out the night before I came to your job.”
Sunni searched her face. “And the minute you knew?”
“I confronted him. Then I found you,” Keisha said. “Because I couldn’t sleep in that house knowing another woman had buried a man who was breathing beside me.”
For a moment, Sunni said nothing. Her anger was still there—hot, deep, earned—but something inside it shifted.
Keisha had not stolen her husband. Marcus had stolen the truth from both of them.
Sunni’s eyes finally moved past Keisha and landed on Marcus.
“I fought every day to keep my kids from turning bitter,” Sunni said. “I carried your funeral. I carried your name. I carried your absence like a backpack full of bricks.”
Keisha stepped to the side, no longer standing between them. This was Marcus’s weight to carry.
Sunni stepped back, eyes finally flicking to Marcus.
“You hid from us. Now look at what you done made.”
Then she turned to Kane and Prince.
“You ready?”
Prince nodded. Jaw tight.
Kane didn’t speak.
They stepped forward.
Marcus took one step toward the porch.
Then Kane raised her voice—louder than she’d ever spoken to her father before.