11
Howard called it a bloodbath, and for once my agent wasn't exaggerating for effect.
Three of my five endorsement deals pulled out within seventy-two hours. The shoe contract held on, barely, with language in a new memo about conduct clauses that made it clear they were watching and waiting for a reason to finish the job. Maddox's lawyers sent a formal letter ending the partnership before the ink on the press release ever had a chance to dry, and underneath the legal language was a single sentence I read about ten times: Mr. Holloway wishes you well in your personal matters and considers this chapter closed.
Personal matters. Like my son was a line item.
I sat in the kitchen with that letter in front of me and Howard pacing behind me running numbers out loud that all ended in the same place. The agency I had built my whole future around was dead before it ever opened its doors, and I was about thirty-one years old starting over with a fraction of what I thought I had two weeks ago.
"We rebuild," Howard said. "Smaller. No Maddox money in the floor of it. Just us. It's gonna take longer and it's gonna hurt worse, but Kordel—" He stopped pacing and looked at me. "I gotta ask you something and I need a real answer. Was it worth it?"
I thought about my son in light-up shoes crossing a ballroom floor toward me like I was the only thing in that whole building that mattered.
"Yeah," I said. "It was worth it."
He nodded slow, the nod of a man who'd expected that answer and just needed to hear it out loud anyway. "Then let's go build something that don't have nobody else's strings on it."
***
My mother called every day for a week and I let it ring through every time.
On the eighth day she showed up at my door instead, I almost didn't let her in, and then I did, because whatever she was, she was still the woman who lit candles in a dark apartment so two boys wouldn't be scared, and some debts you pay even when you're furious about owing them.
She sat at my kitchen table and looked smaller than I remembered her being. "I lost my best friend at that party," she said. "Maddox and I had known each other twenty years. He doesn't return my calls anymore either."
"I'm not gonna feel sorry for you about that, Mama."
"I'm not asking you to." She folded her hands. "I'm telling you because I think, for the first time in a long time, I actually understand a piece of what it cost everybody else for me to protect what I thought I was protecting." She looked at me. "I'm not going to stand here and tell you I'd do it different if I had it to do over, 'cause I don't know that's true yet, and I told you I wasn't gonna lie to you no more. But I'm working on understanding it. That's the most honest thing I got for you right now."
It wasn't enough. I told her. But it was more than she'd given me before.
***
I went to Winter's three days after the hospital, after the worst of the press had thinned out. I sat at the kitchen table while Khari watched cartoons down the hall. I told her the rest of what I'd been carrying.
"Jazmine's pregnant," I said. "She told me at her father's house, two days after the party. She's keeping it. We're done, that part's not in question no more, but there's a child coming that's mine, and I needed you to hear that from me before you heard it from anywhere else."
Winter didn't say anything for a long moment. Then she set her cup down hard enough that it rattled.
"So let me get this straight." Her voice had an edge I hadn't heard from her since the day I first walked back into her shop. "You spent six years building a whole life I wasn't allowed in. That life just burned to the ground in front of three hundred people and a shooting. And in the wreckage of all that, there's gonna be another child of yours walking this earth that my son is gonna have to share you with."
"Winter—"
"I'm not finished." She stood up. "I have spent five years being the only one. The only parent in that room, the only one up at two in the morning, the only name on the only form. And now I'm supposed to make room — gracefully, I'm guessing, since that's what you came over here hoping for — for a whole different child with a whole different mama, while I'm still trying to figure out how to explain to my own son why grown men shoot at parties."
"I'm not asking you to make room for anything. I'm telling you the truth because I promised you I was done hiding things."
"The truth." She laughed, and there wasn't a drop of humor in it. "The truth is you keep handing me earthquakes and calling it honesty, Kordel. There's a difference between being honest and just refusing to carry the weight of your own news by yourself."
I sat there and took it, because every word of it was fair, and a man who's spent his whole adult life learning how to read a defense ought to be able to recognize when he's the one who's wrong.
"You're right," I said. "I should've sat with it a minute before I brought it to you. I'm sorry."
She stood at her counter with her back to me for a long moment, breathing hard, and when she turned back around her eyes were wet and furious at the same time.
"I am not your dumping ground," she said. "I will co-parent with you. I will be civil to that woman if I ever have to be in a room with her, for our son's sake. But I am not the place you bring every hard thing in your life just because I'm the one who's always been here to catch it. You hear me?"
"I hear you."
"Good." She wiped her face with the back of her hand, annoyed at herself for needing to. "Now get for a minute. I need five minutes where you're not in my eyeline."
I got up and went and sat on the porch, and through the window I watched her stand at that sink with both hands gripping the edge of it, getting herself back together one breath at a time, and I understood, sitting out there in the heat, that I had a lot more rebuilding to do than just an agency.