KAISEN #2
The words didn’t land right away. I heard them the way you hear something in a language you’re only half fluent in—recognizable, but not yet real.
“What do you mean one,” I said, my voice coming out rougher than I intended, my hands gripping the arms of the chair. “There’s two. She’s carrying twins. Check again.”
“Kaisen.” Truth’s voice barely a whisper, her eyes still locked on the ceiling like she couldn’t make herself look at the screen or at either of us.
“Check again,” I said, and I was already pushing myself up out of the chair despite my side screaming at me, despite the cane clattering against the floor, because this wasn’t right, this couldn’t be right.
I had come here for my son, and I was not leaving this room until somebody told me he was still here.
Dr. Broussard’s eyes lifted from the monitor to Truth’s face, and whatever she was about to say, I could already feel the shape of it filling up the silence before she said a single word.
Dr. Broussard set the wand on the tray and pulled off her gloves, one finger at a time, like she needed the motion to organize what she had to say next.
“I want to explain this carefully,” she said, “because I know how it sounds, and I don’t want either of you walking out of here with more fear than you need to carry.
” She looked at Truth first. “The girl is strong. Her heartbeat is exactly where it should be for this gestational age. She’s measuring well, moving well. There’s nothing wrong with her.”
“And the boy,” I said. It wasn’t a question. I already knew what came next, I just needed her to say it so I could hate the words instead of the silence.
“There’s no heartbeat,” Dr. Broussard said.
“In twin pregnancies, sometimes one twin’s development stops, and the tissue is reabsorbed by the body over time.
It’s called vanishing twin syndrome. It isn’t caused by anything either parent did.
It isn’t caused by anything the surviving twin did.
It’s a complication of the pregnancy itself, and it happens more often than people realize, especially early on. ”
Reabsorbed.
Like he was never anything but material. Like my son had been raw stock and gotten filed away into inventory nobody asked for.
I looked at Amai.
I don’t know what I expected. Grief, maybe, some baseline human recognition that a child had disappeared out of the world before he ever got the chance to be in it.
What I got instead was almost nothing—which was worse.
His jaw didn’t move. His hands stayed loose in his lap.
But his mouth did something, just barely, at one corner, and he let a breath out slow through his nose like a man setting down a weight he’d been carrying too long.
Relief. That’s what it was. He was relieved.
Truth broke before I could open my mouth about it.
A sound came out of her that didn’t sound like crying at first, more like something tearing, and then she had both hands over her face, and her shoulders were shaking.
Dr. Broussard was already moving toward her, murmuring something about it being okay to grieve even a pregnancy this complicated, that loss is loss no matter the circumstances.
That’s what did it. Not the doctor’s words. Truth’s sound. It cracked something open in me that had been holding since I read her text that morning, since I decided he had my mother’s eyes, since I built him a whole room with elephants on the wallpaper.
“Of course,” I said. I heard my own voice rising and didn’t try to stop it. “Of course, it’s her. Of course, your daughter took him. She’s not even here yet, and she’s already just like you—taking what she wants, taking what isn’t hers.”
“Kaisen.” Truth reached for me, her hand landing on my arm, wet-faced, trying to pull me back into the room instead of wherever I was going. “That’s not—it doesn’t work that way. It’s not anybody’s fault—”
“Everything works that way with him. Everything he touches, he takes. He took my pride, he took the streets, he took you, and now he’s taken my son too, and he’s sitting there looking relieved about it.”
“That’s enough.” Dr. Broussard’s voice cut clean through the room, calm but with an edge under it that said she’d had to say versions of that sentence before, in rooms exactly like this one. “This is a medical space. I understand this is devastating. But I need everyone to breathe.”
I didn’t breathe. I turned and left, because staying meant looking at Amai’s face for one more second, and I already knew if I did that, I was going to do something in that office I couldn’t undo.
The parking lot air hit me like something with weight to it.
I got in my car and sat there with the engine off, hands on the wheel, staring at the beige stucco of the building like it might rearrange itself—like if I looked away and looked back hard enough, this would turn out to be a different day.
It didn’t rearrange. It just sat there being exactly what it was.
I ran it back. The doctor’s hands. The way she’d searched long, carefully, before she said anything.
The way Amai hadn’t asked a single question the entire time—no check again, no are you sure, nothing.
A man who found out a child was gone would ask questions.
He didn’t ask because he didn’t need to.
Because somewhere he already knew. Because a girl who could absorb her brother in the womb before she’d even drawn breath was exactly the kind of daughter a man like Amai Landry would produce—something that took what it wanted and left nothing behind for anyone else, starting before she was even born.
I thought about the reabsorption thing the doctor said, the vanishing twin thing, and I let myself turn it over the way you turn over a rock to see what’s living underneath it.
Convenient. That’s what it was. Too convenient, happening two months after Amai found out I was the one whose blood ran in that boy, happening right when there was no version of the future where Amai got to have everything and I got to have nothing.
I didn’t believe in coincidences that clean. I never had. Streets teach you that nothing that convenient is actually an accident—somebody always benefits, and you follow the benefit to find the hand.
And the hand, every time, in every direction I turned it, came back to him.
Truth didn’t see it. That was the part that scraped me rawest, sitting there in that car with the AC not yet running and sweat starting under my collar.
She was in there right now, letting that doctor comfort her, letting Amai sit three feet away, wearing his relief like cologne, and she couldn’t see any of it because she’d been inside his world so long she’d stopped being able to tell where the walls were.
That’s what he did. He didn’t lock doors.
He just made you forget there was ever an outside.
I understood, sitting there, that nobody was going to fix this for her.
Not Delphine, not her sisters, not some private doctor writing notes in a chart that would get filed and forgotten.
Somebody would have to actually take her out of that house, out of that life, far enough that she could breathe clean air long enough to remember who she used to be before Amai Landry decided she belonged to him.
It wasn’t kidnapping if you were saving somebody. Nobody arrests a man for pulling a person out of a burning building just because the person didn’t ask to be carried.
She would hate me for it, at first. I let myself sit with that, turned it over like the rest. She would scream, probably.
She would call it something ugly. But hate wasn’t the same as wrong, and once she was somewhere quiet, somewhere without his hands on every door, she would remember.
She would see clearly again, the way she had before the ring, the money, and the war made her forget there was a version of safety that didn’t come wrapped in his name.
I thought about the riverboat I purchased secretly a while back. Just a project I started just to have somewhere to disappear when being a Landry became to much, which was often.
The renovations were nearly finished—the contractor had texted me two days ago about the final walkthrough. Every room built exactly the way I wanted it. Nobody knew about it. Not Winston, not Amai, not a single soul outside the four men I paid in cash and silence.
A place nobody could follow us to.
I started the engine.
I didn’t know exactly when yet. I didn’t know exactly how.
But I knew, pulling out of that parking lot with my hands steadier than they had any right to be, that I was done waiting for Truth to choose me on her own.
She wasn’t going to. Not while she couldn’t see straight.
Somebody had to choose for her, the way you choose for somebody drowning who’s too far under to swim toward the light themselves.
I was going to be that somebody.
TO BE CONTINUED…