4
I reached for him at three in the morning and found cold sheets.
I lay there for a moment with my hand flat on his side of the bed, registering the temperature of it, calculating how long he had been gone. Not just stepped out for water. Not the bathroom. Long enough for his body heat to leave the mattress completely. An hour at least. Maybe two.
I did not panic. I want to be clear about that. I got up, I put on my robe, and I moved through the house the way you move when you already know what you're going to find and you're just conducting the confirmation. Kitchen, empty. Living room, empty. The door to his home office, open, dark. I went to the front window and looked out at the driveway.
His truck was gone.
I stood at that window for a moment. I looked at the empty space where his truck had been parked and I thought about the address on his iPad, the photo of the little boy with the dinosaur toy, the map to a house on the Westside.
Then I went to my office. I sat down at my desk. I opened my laptop.
I had built the file over two weeks, the way I built any case — methodically, without emotion, one verifiable fact at a time. I had her name, her address, her business license for the salon, her Instagram going back three years. I had a rough timeline built from public records and the engagement announcement Kordel and I had put out and a few things that were not hard to find if you knew how to look. A woman with a law degree and a father with resources does not have to guess at much.
I opened the file and I added tonight's date and the notation: left the house approx 1-2am. Did not inform.
Then I sat back and I looked at what I had built and I let myself feel it. I mean really feel it for exactly five minutes. I had given myself this when I found the photo. Five minutes per revelation. No more. A woman who falls apart in the middle of a crisis is a woman who loses, and I had not spent my entire life clawing out of my mother's wreckage to become a woman who lost.
So for five minutes I sat at my desk and I felt the thing that lived underneath all the strategy and the preparation. The thing that hurt. Because it did hurt. There is a version of me that people who know me professionally would not recognize, a version that cried at our first Christmas and kept the little card he put in my gift for years in the drawer of my nightstand. A version that looked at his sleeping face sometimes and felt something so clean and so certain that I thought this was the one thing in my life I had not had to fight for. This was the one thing that had just been good.
I let that version of me have her five minutes.
Then I closed the folder and I called my father.
***
He answered on the second ring, because Maddox was always awake before the rest of the world decided to be.
"It's early," he said. Not a complaint. A fact.
"I know. I need to tell you some things."
I waited a second because he would have heard it in my voice, not the crack of it, because I do not crack, but the quality of it. My father spent forty years in rooms where the sound of a person's control cost them something, and he knew the difference between composed and contained.
"Talk to me," he said.
I told him everything. Not with emotion, not with the shaking hands version of it. The facts, in order, the way I would present them to a judge. There is a woman. There is a child. The child appears to be Kordel's based on age, appearance, and the fact that he has been making regular visits to her home over the past several weeks. I believe he was there tonight. I have documentation.
My father was quiet through all of it. When I finished, there was a pause that lasted long enough that I counted the seconds.
"How old is the child," he said.
"Five. He'll be six in March."
Another pause. Longer this time.
"Jazmine." His voice came out in the tone it only reached when he was genuinely angry, which was not often, because Maddox Holloway was a man who had converted his anger into leverage so many years ago he barely distinguished between the two. "How long have you known."
"Two weeks. I wanted to be certain before I came to you."
"You should have come to me immediately."
"I know. I made a judgment call."
He breathed through his nose. I knew that breath. It was the breath that meant he was rearranging his thoughts around new information at a speed that would have frightened a lesser man. "The deal," he said.
"I don't know yet."
"The deal is real money, Jazmine. Real investment. I put my name behind that man."
"I know what you put behind him."
"And you are six days from—"
"Daddy." I said it quiet. "I know. I know all of it. I am sitting at my desk at four in the morning because I know all of it. I just need you to put your people on it and get me everything there is to get on this woman, her situation, her brother — there is a brother with a record, I want all of it — and I want to know by end of day."
A pause. "And Kordel."
"I'll handle Kordel."
"Jazmine—"
"I will handle him, Daddy. That's mine to handle." I closed the laptop. "Just get me the information."
He got off the phone the way my father always got off the phone, which was without a goodbye, just the click of the call ending, because he did not waste words on ceremony when there was work to be done.
I sat in my office for another hour. I did not go back to bed. I worked, real work, a brief I was due to file by the end of week, because the world did not pause for personal disasters and I had never once let it. I billed two hours between four and six in the morning while my fiancée was on the other side of the city making decisions that were about to change both our lives.
Just before six I went to the kitchen. I made coffee and stood at the window over the sink. I watched the light come up over Atlanta. The city went from dark to gray to a particular pale gold that I had always found beautiful despite everything. I stood there with both hands around my cup and I thought about the question my father had not asked out loud but that had been underneath every word of our conversation.
Did I want to save this.
I thought about the shoes by the door. I thought about years of small, quiet kindnesses, the kind that do not make sense for a man who does not mean them. I thought about the way he laughed when nobody was watching. I thought about the child in the photograph with the green dinosaur, who looked so much like the man I was about to marry that there was no version of a future where that child ceased to exist.
I thought about my mother in three church suits on Sunday morning.
I did not have an answer to the question yet. I was a lawyer and I knew better than to decide a case before all the evidence was in. What I knew was that I had a position and I was not leaving it without a fight, and that whatever Kordel had done and whoever he had done it with, he was going to come through that door this morning and face me, and I was going to make sure that conversation happened on my terms.
I set my cup down. I went upstairs. I made the bed with clean, precise movements, smoothing every corner the way I had been taught, I showered and got dressed in the dark suit I saved for the days when I needed to feel like the most formidable version of myself. I did my face and I put on the ring, and I went back down to the kitchen. I made a second cup of coffee, sat at the table and waited.
***
I almost didn't take the test.
It had been sitting under the bathroom sink for three days. I had bought it the way you buy something you know you need but aren't ready to use yet, that middle ground between knowing and knowing officially. My cycle was late. Only by nine days, and I was not a woman who was regular under stress, and the last month had been the most stressful of my professional life even before the other thing, so I had told myself it was that. Told myself to wait another week. Told myself I would know when I needed to know.
I went up to get a cardigan before Kordel came home because the kitchen was cold, I went into the bathroom for a hair tie, and looked at the cabinet under the sink, and something in me said now.
I don't know why that morning. I don't know why at that specific moment. I opened the box and I followed the instructions the way I followed every instruction in my life — precisely, completely, without shortcuts — and I set the test on the counter and I waited the three minutes with my hands in my lap and my eyes on the wall.
Two lines.
I sat on the bathroom floor. I had never once in my adult life sat on a bathroom floor. There was no reason to, in the ordinary way of things. A floor is for standing on. It is where you end up in a crisis, in a collapse, in the particular kind of grief that takes your legs out from under you.
I sat there and I looked at the ceiling and I thought about my mother. I thought about a woman who had everything and ended up with nothing, and I thought about the way nothing had felt in that house, the feeling of an absence that used to be a life. I had spent thirty-four years making sure I would never feel that from the inside.
And now I was sitting on a bathroom floor with a positive pregnancy test in my hand and a fiancé who had spent the night on the other side of the city with a woman who had been carrying his child for five years, the specific, unbearable irony of it sat on my chest and did not move.
I did not cry.
I got up off that floor, which was the hardest thing I had done in recent memory, and I put the test in the back of the cabinet behind a box of tampons, and I closed the cabinet door, and I looked at myself in the mirror for a long time.
I looked like myself. That was the strange part. I looked like Jazmine Holloway, composed, dressed, ready. Nothing on the outside had changed.
Everything on the inside was different.
I went back downstairs and I sat at my kitchen table with my coffee and I thought about what I was holding now. A pregnancy. His baby. Coming into this the same week the whole thing blew apart. I thought about whether to tell him. I thought about when. I thought about how much this changed everything.
A fiancée he could walk away from. The mother of his child was a different proposition entirely.
I thought about the woman who had raised his first child alone for five years, I thought about whether I wanted to be a version of that story, and I thought about what my father had built, and what I had built, and what I was not willing to lose.
By the time I heard his key in the lock, I had made three decisions.
I was going to keep this baby.
I was not going to tell him today.
And when I did tell him, it was going to be at exactly the right moment, in exactly the right way, to maximum effect.
I had not become my mother. I had become something smarter than that.
I arranged my face and I picked up my coffee cup and I looked at the door.