20. AMAI
AMAI
Itold myself I was just checking in.
That’s what I’d been doing all week—sending texts, asking how she was feeling, making sure she was eating.
Professional concern. The kind of attention you’d give to any high-value investment.
That’s what I told myself as I drove through the Seventh Ward at three in the afternoon on a Wednesday, my suit jacket folded on the passenger seat, and my tie loosened just enough to breathe.
The truth was harder to swallow.
The truth was that I’d woken up at 5:00 AM thinking about her throwing up in Delphine’s bathroom.
That I’d sat through two meetings barely hearing a word because my mind kept circling back to the way her voice sounded on the phone last week—exhausted, defeated, trying so hard to sound fine when she clearly wasn’t.
That I’d finally told Raymond to reschedule everything after lunch because I couldn’t focus on contracts and territory disputes when Truth was seven weeks pregnant and couldn’t keep anything down.
I pulled up to the shotgun house and cut the engine.
The neighborhood was alive in that mid-afternoon way—kids on bikes, someone’s radio playing Juvenile from an open window, the smell of somebody’s grill already going even though it wasn’t even four o’clock yet.
A few people on porches tracked my car with the kind of attention that said they knew exactly who I was, even if they’d never seen my face.
I got out and buttoned my suit jacket out of habit, then immediately unbuttoned it again. Too formal. Too much. I was walking into Delphine Renois’s house, not a boardroom.
The porch steps creaked under my weight. I could hear music playing inside—something old school, maybe the Isley Brothers—and the sound of someone moving around in the kitchen. I knocked twice, firm but not aggressive.
Footsteps. Then the door swung open, and Delphine stood there in house shoes and a faded LSU t-shirt, a dish towel thrown over her shoulder. Her eyes went from surprised to knowing in about half a second.
“Back again huh?” she said, one eyebrow raised.
“Yes ma’am.”
She looked me up and down—the suit, the shoes, the watch I should have left in the car. Then she looked past me at the Mercedes parked at the curb, and something shifted in her expression. Not disapproval exactly. More like confirmation of something she’d already suspected.
“You sure are involved for this to be an arrangement,” she said, her voice carrying that particular tone mothers use when they’re calling you out without actually calling you out.
I met her eyes. Didn’t flinch. “Just trying to be here for Truth.”
Delphine studied me for another long moment. Then, she smirked—just a little, just enough—and stepped aside. “Well, come on in then. She’s on the couch looking pitiful.”
I walked past her into the house, and the temperature of my entire world shifted.
The living room was small, crowded with furniture that had seen better decades, but it was clean and lived-in in a way my house had never been.
Pictures on every surface—Truth as a baby, Truth and her sisters at somebody’s graduation, Delphine younger and smiling with a man I assumed was Truth’s father.
The couch was floral print and sagging in the middle.
The coffee table had water rings and a stack of magazines.
The whole place smelled like whatever Delphine was cooking in the kitchen—something with onions and bell pepper, something that made my stomach wake up and pay attention.
Truth was curled up on the couch in sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt, her hair pulled back in a messy bun, one hand pressed against her stomach. She looked up when I walked in and her eyes went wide.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, sitting up too fast and then wincing.
“Checking on you.” I moved toward the couch, my expensive shoes silent on the worn carpet.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” I sat down next to her, close enough that our knees almost touched. “You only say you’re fine when you’re really not. I had to make sure.”
She stared at me like I’d just spoken a language she didn’t know. From the kitchen doorway, I could feel Delphine watching us with the kind of attention that missed nothing.
“What do you need?” I asked, my voice lower now, just for her.
Truth shook her head. “I don’t know. Nothing helps. I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can’t even think straight. The nausea just—” She stopped, her hand moving in a helpless gesture. “It’s constant.”
“You eating anything at all?”
“Not really. I had some homemade chicken soup yesterday that stayed down, but everything else just—” She made a face. “I can’t even look at food without wanting to throw up.”
I pulled out my phone.
“What are you doing?” Truth asked.
I didn’t answer. Just pulled up my contacts and hit the number for the concierge service I kept on retainer for situations exactly like this—situations where money could solve a problem faster than anything else.
The line picked up on the second ring. “Mr. Landry. How can we assist you today?”
“I need a chef,” I said, my eyes still on Truth.
“Someone who specializes in pregnancy nutrition. Someone who can work with severe morning sickness and food aversions. I need them at—” I glanced at Delphine.
She rattled off the address without me having to ask.
“—this address. Today. Within two hours.”
“Of course, Mr. Landry. We’ll have someone there within ninety minutes. Will you need them for one meal or ongoing service?”
“Ongoing. At least through the first trimester. Maybe longer depending on how things go.”
“Understood. We’ll send our best.”
I hung up.
Truth was staring at me. “You can’t just?—”
“I can,” I said, sliding my phone back into my pocket. “And I did.”
“Amai—”
“You want some coffee, Mr. Landry?” Delphine’s voice cut through whatever Truth was about to say. She was standing in the kitchen doorway now, arms crossed, that same knowing look on her face.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, grateful for the interruption. “Thank you. And call me Amai.”
“You take it black or you need cream and sugar?”
“Black is fine.”
She disappeared back into the kitchen. I heard the sound of a mug being pulled from a cabinet, the coffee pot being lifted from the burner. Truth was still staring at me like I’d just rearranged her entire understanding of reality.
“You didn’t have to do that,” she said quietly.
“Yeah, I did.”
“The contract doesn’t say?—”
“Fuck the contract.” The words came out harder than I meant them to. I softened my voice. “You’re carrying my child, and you can’t eat. That’s not something I’m going to ignore just because a piece of paper doesn’t explicitly require me to care.”
Her eyes went bright. Not quite tears, but close.
Delphine came back with the coffee—Community Coffee in a chipped LSU mug, the smell of chicory rising with the steam.
She handed it to me, and I took it, the ceramic warm against my palms. I sipped it.
Strong, bitter, perfect. The kind of coffee that had been brewed the same way in New Orleans kitchens for generations.
“Thank you,” I said.
Delphine nodded and then, instead of going back to the kitchen, she sat in the recliner across from us.
The chair was old, the fabric worn smooth in places, but she settled into it like a queen taking her throne.
She picked up a glass of something amber from the side table—probably bourbon, maybe whiskey—and took a slow sip, her eyes moving between me and Truth with the kind of assessment that made me feel like I was being studied.
The three of us sat there in the small living room. The Isley Brothers were still playing from somewhere in the back of the house. Outside, I heard kids laughing, a car door slamming, the normal sounds of a neighborhood in the middle of a weekday afternoon.
“So, you’re the father,” Delphine said. It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you care about my daughter.”
I looked at Truth. She was watching me with an expression I couldn’t quite read—something between hope and fear, between wanting me to say yes and being terrified of what that would mean.
I looked back at Delphine. “Yes, ma’am.”
Delphine took another sip of her drink. Set the glass down with a soft clink. Leaned forward slightly, her elbows on her knees, her eyes locked on mine with an intensity that would have made most men look away.
“Good,” she said. “Because if you hurt her, I’ll kill you myself.”
The words hung in the air between us.
I should have been offended. Should have reminded her who I was, what I was capable of, and how many people had made threats like that and lived to regret it.
But sitting in her living room, drinking her coffee, and watching the way she looked at her daughter with a fierceness that transcended everything else—I respected it.
More than that, I understood it.
So, I smiled. A real smile, not the polite mask I wore in business meetings or the cold expression I used to intimidate enemies. A genuine smile that felt strange on my face because I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used it.
“Understood,” I said.
Delphine studied me for another long moment. Then she smiled back—just a little, just enough—and picked up her glass again. “All right then. We got an understanding.”
Truth was looking between us like she couldn’t quite believe what had just happened.
Like she’d expected her mother to throw me out or for me to get offended and leave.
Instead, we’d just negotiated a truce over coffee and threats, and somehow it felt more binding than any contract Raymond had ever drawn up.
The chef arrived an hour and forty-three minutes later.