Chapter 16
SABINE
When Adair walked out, Sabine would never admit out loud that a part of her left with him. It finally felt final. Even after being divorced. Even after lawyers and papers and a judge stamping them into separate people. This was different.
Adair and Sabine were done.
It wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t bitter. It was just…what it was.
Sabine sat in the same spot long after he left. The silence in the house didn’t feel peaceful, it felt like a void. Like a door had been shut on a chapter she hadn’t even realized was still cracked open.
For the first time since the baby, since Ariyah, she felt the full weight of her aloneness, not the kind she’d grown used to in his absence, but the kind that came from letting go of the last piece of hope.
He had finally told the truth. All of it and she had finally said everything she needed to say.
Not just the pain and the anger, but the love too.
The stupid, unshakable, trembling love she’d given to a man who didn’t know how to carry it without dropping pieces along the way.
Her body felt sore. Her mouth dry. She hadn’t realized she was crying again until she tasted salt.
Sabine pulled the throw blanket from the couch over her shoulders and sat back, clutching it to her chest like it could keep her from unraveling. She wasn’t even angry anymore. She was just empty.
Not the kind of empty that screamed. The kind that whispered.
She didn’t want him back.
That was the thing. For all her pain, for all her tears—she didn’t want him back.
She didnt want that Adair back but she wanted what they were supposed to be.
The life they swore they were building. The family she had imagined in those quiet nights with Ade asleep on her chest and Adair’s voicemail playing again.
She wanted that version of him. Of her. Of them.
And it didn’t exist.
Sabine finally got up and checked on her son. He was curled up in bed, breathing easy, face at peace. She kissed his forehead and whispered a thank you to the dark. For him. For her strength and for the final break that would let her heal.
In her bedroom, the quiet was different. It wasn’t haunted. It wasn’t aching. It was just quiet. She walked to her dresser, not even thinking, just moving. Her fingers hovered above her jewelry box before lifting the lid.
There it was.
The necklace.
She hadn’t worn it in since she filed for divorce—first out of anger then because it felt as if it wasn’t hers anymore. However, she’d never moved it. It sat right at the top, next to the engagement ring and her wedding band. Always in sight. Like some twisted form of ritual. Of remembering.
The locket gleamed under the soft light. That heart-shaped diamond still winked at her. The note engraved inside—the words she once clung to—flashed back in her mind:
Through all the noise, I hope my love for you is always louder.
She remembered sobbing when he gave it to her.
Remembered the way her hands trembled as he clasped it around her neck.
How she told him she’d never take it off.
She meant it then. She hadn’t meant to break that promise but love and life had torn it from her.
Sabine picked it up, holding it in her palm. It was beautiful but beauty didn’t make it wearable. She set it down gently, then slid the rings beside it and closed the lid.
It was time.
Maybe for the first time, really. She sat on the edge of her bed, staring ahead blankly. Then slowly, her mind drifted to something she hadn’t thought about in months. Her software.
That thing she once believed in. That thing she told Adair about on their third date, eyes glowing, full of ideas and plans.
“I want to build my own analytical software,” she had said. “It’s early, but I’ve been sketching out designs, mapping out algorithms. I think I could really make it work.”
He’d said, “That’s dope as fuck.” And she’d believed he meant it.
But the truth was, she let herself get buried. In him. In marriage. In motherhood. In grief.
Sabine leaned back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, eyes still wet but no longer spilling.
“I think I want to remember who I was,” she whispered into the dark. Then after a beat: “And I think I want to meet who I still could be.”
THE NEXT MORNING
Sabine sat at her desk, staring at the cluster of dashboards open on her monitor.
The soft hum of the office and faint click-clacks of nearby keystrokes wrapped around her like a thin layer of noise—just enough to keep her tethered to the present.
Her nails tapped against a notepad, absentmindedly.
She’d been analyzing the monthly operations report, double-checking KPIs for one of their healthcare clients, but her mind kept drifting back to something else. Something older.
Hers.
Her software.
The idea had started years ago as a scribbled mess in a spiral-bound notebook.
An analytical platform that could automate decision models for small-to-mid-sized companies.
Not just dashboards and projections—but predictive insights.
Something lean, accessible, and Black-woman-built.
She used to talk to Adair about it all the time, back when he’d sit on the couch at night reading depositions while she researched open-source modeling tools on her laptop.
He’d always said, “that’s dope as fuck,” in that easy way of his.
And then he’d return to work. Sabine sighed and leaned back in her chair.
Her eyes swept outside her office across the workspace.
Everyone looked focused, consumed by their screens and spreadsheets.
No one was looking at her. She could have cried, and no one would’ve noticed.
Or maybe they would’ve. Maybe she just didn’t care.
“You good?” a voice asked Sabine looked back up to see Malik leaning on the open-door frame, holding a coffee cup and watching her like he already knew the answer. He worked analytics a few offices down and had a way of showing up whenever she needed someone to interrupt her spirals.
“I’m fine,” she lied.
Malik raised an eyebrow. “You sure? You look like you were about to fight your screen.”
She cracked the barest smile. “Just thinking.”
“You do that a lot.”
“Old habit.”
He leaned in a little, dropping his voice. “Thinking about quitting?”
“No,” she said quickly. “Thinking about building something.”
That caught his attention.
Sabine gestured toward her notepad. “I had this idea back in school. A real-time decision software built around predictive analysis and weighted scenario models. Something that could give small businesses smart, tailored recommendations without needing a full analytics team.”
“Wait…you built that?”
“Built the concept. Never finished the framework.” Her voice lowered. “It was supposed to be my thing. My something. But life…” she trailed off.
Malik was quiet for a moment. Then he nodded. “That’s actually fire, Sabine.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. You talking scalable SaaS with optimization logic and forecasting? That could be huge. Especially for Black-owned orgs that can’t afford consultants every quarter.”
Sabine blinked. The words caught in her chest. It had been years since someone looked her in the face and said her dream could be real.
“You got it somewhere?”
“Bits and pieces. Old notebooks. Maybe a partial model buried in my Dropbox.”
“Dust it off,” he said. “Run it by me. I’ll help you test it if you want.”
Sabine looked down at her screen—at the report she’d been dreading, the clients she managed, the day-to-day she’d accepted as the ceiling.
For the first time in a long time, she thought: Maybe not.
“Okay,” she said.
They stayed in the office hours past lunch—past when anyone else really cared about dashboards or deliverables.
Sabine had barely touched her salad. Her eyes stayed glued to the screen, fingers dancing over her keyboard as she built out the bones of what used to only live in her notebooks.
She and Malik had turned one of the shared meeting rooms into a makeshift war room.
Sticky notes lined the wall. Two laptops.
A whiteboard covered in decision-tree logic, handwritten formulas, and UI wireframe sketches.
It was happening.
They were building it.
Aderra.
That’s what she decided to name it. A mix of Ade and Adair—her children’s father and her son. It sounded sleek, intentional. Familiar. It reminded her that everything she’d lived through wasn’t in vain. That she could create something from the fragments of her past.
Aderra would be a streamlined, AI-assisted platform for small businesses, startups, nonprofits—anyone who needed smarter ways to forecast outcomes, optimize decisions, and run what-if scenarios in real time. Something powerful but intuitive. Something beautiful.
“Okay, this conditional loop is damn near perfect,” Malik said from beside her, eyes squinting at the screen. “It recalculates based on changes to input values with minimal lag.”
“That’s because I built it that way,” Sabine said, half-smiling.
“Oh excuse me, I forgot I was working with the Beyoncé of business analytics.”
She rolled her eyes but didn’t correct him. Truth was, it felt good to be seen as excellent again. Not as someone’s ex-wife, or someone’s grief-stricken mother. Just…her. Sabine. Sharp. Focused. Building something that mattered.
“Hey,” Malik said, his voice dipping softer. “You really are kind of brilliant, you know?”
Sabine didn’t look up.
“Malik…”
“I’m just saying.”
She set her pen down. “I need you to hear me, and I’m only gonna say it once.
” That got his attention. He sat back, hands raised slightly in mock surrender.
“This—” she motioned between them, to the laptops, the code, the whiteboard, “—is work. It’s my dream, my second chance.
I appreciate your help more than you know, but if you can’t keep it professional, I understand.
I won’t be mad if you want to step away. ”