44. Asha
Asha
The shaking stopped sometime before dawn.
I was on the couch with a blanket Omar had put over me, my head on a cushion, my knees pulled up to my chest. Nene was asleep in the bedroom.
Omar was in the chair across from me, his phone on his thigh, his eyes closed but not sleeping.
Every time a car passed on the street below his eyes opened, scanned the window, then closed again.
Supreme was dead. The man who'd kept me for three years was gone. I kept thinking those words, turning them over, testing them for weight.
Omar walked into that room and walked me out. He closed the door behind him. Supreme didn't come out.
I didn't ask what happened in that room. I didn't need to.
Omar's phone rang just after the light started coming through the blinds. He answered it quietly, listened for a minute, then hung up.
"Devon's team got into Supreme's apartment," he said. "The safe in the bedroom closet. They cracked it before the police arrived."
"What was inside?"
"Emergency passports. Three of them, different names. A backup phone. Cash, about forty thousand. And a ledger. Handwritten, going back years. Devon's going through it now."
A handwritten ledger. Supreme had kept records by hand, away from any computer Devon could hack, locked in a safe I'd mentioned at Portia's table. Whatever was in that book was something he'd wanted no one to find.
"Rest," Omar said. "I need to go see Kadeem."
"Everything that happened is my problem too."
"Not this part." He kissed the top of my head. "I'll be back."
He left and I sat on the couch alone for a while. Nene came out of the bedroom with her hair wrapped and Omar's t-shirt hanging past her knees. She took one look at me and went to the kitchen to make coffee.
"He's dead, isn't he?" she asked from the counter.
"Yeah."
She poured two cups, brought them to the couch, and sat down next to me. We drank without talking.
"How do you feel?" she asked eventually.
"I don't know yet." I wrapped both hands around the mug. "I keep waiting for something to hit me. Relief or guilt or sadness or something. But it's just... quiet. Like someone turned the volume down on everything."
"That's shock, baby."
"Maybe."
"It'll hit you eventually. When it does, I'll be here."
I leaned my head against her shoulder. "I know you will."
Ray showed up that afternoon.
I was at Portia's house when it happened. Omar had taken me there after his meeting with Kadeem because the apartment didn't feel safe with TK still unaccounted for. Portia's house was Baptiste territory, familiar, protected.
The doorbell rang and Portia answered it. I was in the kitchen and I heard his voice before I saw him. That voice I'd grown up listening to, the voice that used to read me bedtime stories before my mother died, the voice that had told me to pack my things and get in the U-Haul when I was sixteen.
"I just want to see my daughter," Ray said from the doorstep.
Portia looked at me through the kitchen doorway. Her face was neutral, waiting for my decision. I stood up from the table and walked to the living room.
Ray was standing just inside the front door. He looked older than the last time I'd seen him. Thinner, greyer, his clothes hanging loose on a frame that used to fill doorways. His eyes found me when I came through the doorway and something in his face crumpled.
"Asha." His voice broke on my name. "Baby girl, I'm so sorry."
I stood in the doorway and looked at the man who'd traded me to Supreme to clear a debt. The man who'd introduced me to a fixer named Len who sat at our kitchen table and arranged my life like a business transaction.
"Why are you here, Ray?"
"I heard what happened. With Supreme. I had to make sure you were okay."
"You had to make sure." I crossed my arms. "You drove to Brooklyn, found this address, and came to Portia Baptiste's house because you had to make sure I was okay. Where was that energy three years ago?"
"Asha, please. I know I don't deserve to be here. I know what I did."
"You don't know what you did." My voice was rising before I could stop it. "You don't know the first thing about what you did because you never asked. Not once. Not one phone call asking how I was doing, how I was living, what my days looked like inside that apartment."
"I called. You didn't pick up."
"Because Supreme answered my phone, Ray! He screened everything. Every call, every text, every email. You think I was just ignoring you? I was being monitored twenty-four hours a day by a man who decided what I wore, what I ate, where I went, and who I spoke to. And you put me there."
Ray's hands were shaking at his sides. "He told me you'd be taken care of. He said it was an arrangement, a partnership. He said you'd have your own money, your own salon..."
"I had my own salon because I built it myself with money I skimmed from a household budget he controlled. Every dollar I saved was a dollar I stole from a man who would have killed me if he'd found out. That's what your arrangement looked like from the inside."
"I didn't know it was like that."
"What did you think it was like?" I stepped toward him. "You handed your daughter to a drug dealer to pay off a debt. What did you think the arrangement looked like? Did you think he was gonna marry me? Take me to dinner and buy me flowers and respect my boundaries?"
"He said..."
"He said what you needed to hear so you'd sign me over without a fight. And you did it. You sat at our kitchen table, the same table where Mama used to feed us, and you let a stranger sit there and negotiate a price for your daughter."
Ray's face was grey. His mouth was working but nothing was coming out. His eyes kept going to the floor, then back to me, then to the floor again.
"I had no choice, Asha. The money I owed..."
"You had choices." I was shaking now, my whole body vibrating with something I'd been holding down for three years.
"You could have sold the house. You could have filed for bankruptcy.
You could have gone to prison for the debt and I would have visited you every week and brought you food and told you I loved you because you would have been my father who made a mistake, not my father who sold his daughter. "
"It wasn't like selling..."
"It was exactly like selling! Len sat at our table, drank our coffee, and told you the number. You agreed. You shook his hand. Then you drove me to Supreme's apartment, kissed me on the forehead, and left. You left me there, Ray. You walked out the door and you didn't come back."
The coffee mug on the counter was next to my hand. I picked it up and threw it. It sailed past Ray's head and shattered against the wall behind him. Portia's good china, pieces flying across the hallway floor. Ray flinched, his hands coming up to cover his face.
"Do you know what I did every night for three years?
" My voice was cracking. "I performed. That's what he wanted.
He wanted a woman who smiled at him, who laughed at his jokes, who sat on his bed and watched him touch himself and told him he was incredible.
And I did it. Every single night. I smiled and I laughed and I made the right sounds because that's what kept me alive.
That's what your arrangement cost me, Ray.
Three years of pretending to be in love with a man who bought me like furniture. "
Ray was crying. Tears running down his face, his shoulders curling inward, his whole body folding under the weight of what I was saying.
Part of me wanted to stop. The part that remembered him carrying me on his shoulders at Coney Island, teaching me to ride a bike in the park, sitting by my bed when I had the flu and reading me stories until I fell asleep.
That part of me wanted to stop talking and let him cry and tell him it was okay.
But it wasn't okay. It was never going to be okay.
"And then you told me Omar had moved on." My voice dropped. "You called me in Atlanta and told me he'd found someone else. That he wasn't waiting anymore. You lied to me about the one person in the world who might have come for me, and you did it to keep me in place. To make sure I didn't run."
"I was trying to protect you."
"Protect me?" I laughed and it came out ugly, raw. "From what? From the man who actually loved me? From the one person who would have walked into Supreme's apartment and carried me out?"
"If you'd run, Supreme would have come after you. After your sisters. He told me what would happen if..."
"So you kept me there to protect my sisters.
That's what you're going with." I stepped closer until I was standing right in front of him.
He was taller than me but he was shrinking, his body curving away from my words.
"You sacrificed one daughter to save the others.
Is that supposed to make me forgive you? "
"I don't expect you to forgive me." His voice was barely audible. "I just needed to see you. To know you were alive."
"I'm alive. Are we done?"
"Asha, please..."
"Are we done, Ray?"
He reached for me. His hand came toward my arm and I stepped backward so fast I knocked into the side table. A picture frame fell off it and hit the floor. Ray's hand hung in the air between us.
"Don't touch me." My voice was quiet now but the quiet was worse than the shouting. "You don't get to touch me. You don't get to hug me and cry on my shoulder and feel better about what you did. You don't get that comfort."
Portia appeared in the hallway doorway. She'd been listening from the kitchen, staying out of it, letting me have my say. But something in my face or my voice or the picture frame on the floor brought her through.
"That's enough," Portia said. Her voice was calm, firm, the voice of a woman who'd run a household through worse than this.
She put herself between me and Ray, not touching either of us, just standing there with her body as a wall.
"You've said what you came to say. She's heard it. Now it's time for you to go."
"I just want her to know..."
"She knows." Portia looked at Ray with an expression that wasn't anger or pity.
It was something colder. Understanding. She understood exactly what he'd done because she'd lived in the same world long enough to know what men did to their families when the pressure got too high.
"Your daughter is safe here. She's fed, she's loved, and she's surrounded by people who'll take care of her.
That's more than you gave her for three years. Now go home."
Ray stood there for another second. His eyes went to me over Portia's shoulder. I looked back at him and I didn't give him what he was looking for. I didn't soften. I didn't cry. I didn't reach for him.
He nodded once, turned toward the door, and left. Portia closed it behind him and locked it.
My legs went. I made it to the couch before they gave out completely, sitting down hard with my hands on my knees, my breathing coming in short sharp bursts. Portia sat next to me without speaking. She put her hand on my back and left it there while I shook.
"I broke your mug," I managed.
"I got more mugs." Her hand moved in slow circles between my shoulder blades. "You okay?"
"No."
"That's alright. You don't have to be okay right now."
I leaned into her. She put her arm around my shoulders and held me against her side, solid, warm, unmovable. She didn't say anything about Ray. She didn't offer wisdom or perspective or advice. She just held me while the shaking slowed and my breathing came back to something that resembled normal.
Shanay arrived in the afternoon. She came into the kitchen with her bag over her shoulder, kissed Portia on the cheek, and looked at me.
"You eaten?"
"Portia fed me."
"Portia always feeds you. I'm asking if you ate."
"I ate."
Shanay nodded and went to the counter. She pulled bread from the cupboard, found the toaster, put two slices in. "You want toast?"
"Portia already fed me, Shanay."
"Toast is different." She leaned against the counter while the toaster worked. "Toast is a conversation. Sit."
I sat. Shanay made toast for both of us, buttered it, cut it in halves, and put the plate between us on the counter. We stood there eating toast in Portia's kitchen and for a minute nobody talked about Supreme or TK or operations or shell companies.
"Those Baptiste men are a lot," Shanay said, biting into her toast.
I laughed. It came out rough but it was real. "Yeah. They are."
"But they show up." Shanay looked at me. "Every time. Whatever it is, however bad it gets, they show up." She took another bite. "Just so you know."
"I'm starting to figure that out."
"Good." She finished her toast, brushed the crumbs off her fingers, and reached for her water. She drank it slowly, one hand resting on her stomach. Something about the gesture made me look twice. She caught me looking and moved her hand away.
"Shanay."
"Hmm?"
"Are you...?"
"Eat your toast, Asha." But she was smiling. A small, private smile that said everything without saying a word.
I ate my toast. Shanay ate hers. Ma moved through the kitchen behind us, wiping down the counter without saying a word.
Supreme was dead. TK was running. My father had come and gone without the forgiveness he'd been looking for. Omar was out there doing whatever he needed to do to keep us safe.
And Shanay had her hand on her stomach when she thought nobody was looking.
The world kept turning. Even after everything, it kept turning.