Chapter 29 Quest
QUEST
I got to Rita’s early because I needed a minute before my brothers showed up. Sat at the kitchen table with a glass of water and my thoughts and let my mind drift to a place it hadn’t been in a long time.
I went to Peanut’s bathroom. My old apartment on Georgia Ave.
I was twenty-four and she was sitting on the counter with a pregnancy test in both hands and a smile so wide it changed the geometry of her whole face.
I remember standing in the doorway with my heart going so fast I thought I was having a cardiac event because this woman—this beautiful, brilliant woman who I would’ve set the whole city on fire for—was telling me I was going to be a father.
I grabbed her off that counter and spun her around and she laughed into my neck and I remember thinking that this was it.
This was the thing that was going to make all the other shit make sense.
The company, the debt, the transport, the darkness I’d been wading through since I was eighteen—none of it mattered because I was about to be somebody’s dad.
I was going to do it right. I was going to be everything my father didn’t get a chance to be.
I named him before he was born. Quindon. Quindon Banks. I had the nursery painted before Peanut was even showing. Blue walls, white crib, a rocking chair I bought from an antique shop in Georgetown because I wanted my son to have things that were built to last.
And then—
“Yo, you good?”
Prime’s voice yanked me out of it. He was standing in the kitchen doorway with Justice behind him, both of them looking at me with that expression brothers give you when they catch you somewhere you don’t usually go.
“Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat. “Just thinking.”
“About what?” Justice asked. “Nigga, you were staring at that glass of water like it you were trying to make it levitate.”
“Nothing. Sit down. We got business to handle before Serenity gets here.”
They sat. But Prime was still looking at me sideways, doing that thing he does where he reads you without saying anything and waits for you to crack. I didn’t crack.
“Something’s different about you,” Prime said. Not a question.
“Different how?”
“I don’t know. You seem… lighter. Less like you’re carrying the world and more like you’re carrying a secret.” He leaned back in his chair. “You got a new girl.”
“I don’t got a new girl.”
“You lying.” Justice was grinning now.
“Both y’all need to mind your—”
“It’s Mehar.” Rita’s voice came from the hallway.
She shuffled into the kitchen with her cane in one hand and her tea in the other, nearly blind but able to see through every single person in her family with surgical precision.
“He took her roller skating and he’s been grinning at his phone ever since. He told me himself.”
“Grandma.” I pinched the bridge of my nose.
“Don’t Grandma me. I’m eighty-four years old and I’ve earned the right to put you on blast in your own kitchen.” She settled into her chair at the head of the table. “Besides, it’s good news. First good news out of this boy’s mouth in fourteen years.”
Prime looked at me. Really looked at me. And his expression shifted from amusement to something more serious. “Mehar?”
“Yeah.”
“Bro, don’t break her heart. I mean that. That girl has been through more than most people survive. She’s family to me through Zainab, and if you hurt her—”
“I’m not gonna hurt her.”
“I’m serious, Quest. She ain’t Lyric. She ain’t Camille. You can’t run your poly playboy shit with her and then bounce when it gets real. She won’t recover from that.” He paused. “And honestly? You don’t want to find out what she does to men who cross her.”
Justice snorted. “Yeah she got that…—”
“…Cage? Yeah.” Prime cut his eyes at me. “Don’t end up in a cage, bro.”
“I’m not worried about a cage.”
“You should be. That woman is creative with her anger.”
“Aight, enough.” I held up my hands. “I hear you. She don’t gotta worry about me. Now can we focus on why we’re actually here before Serenity shows up?”
The room shifted. The lightness left and the weight of what we were about to do settled over the table.
We’d done this before—made decisions about Serenity’s life without her permission.
Julius and the finger. The fallout from that had pushed her away from us for months and into the arms of a man who was ten times worse than the one we’d tried to protect her from.
“Mehar told me about the bruises,” I said. “And the drugs. And Mega blowing up her phone every thirty seconds tracking her location. She saw it at dinner and confronted Serenity about it and Serenity stormed out.”
Prime’s jaw went tight. Justice looked at the table.
“I should’ve handled this months ago,” Prime said quietly. “I knew something was off but she kept pushing me away and I let her.”
“We all let her,” Justice said. “Because the last time we didn’t let her, she stopped talking to us for half a year.”
“Well this time is different,” I said. “This time a man is putting his hands on our sister and feeding her cocaine. So we’re not asking permission. We’re not having a conversation. We’re handling it.”
“What’s the plan?” Prime asked.
“She thinks something’s wrong with Rita. She’s on her way here now. When she walks in, we talk to her. We tell her what we know. We give her the option to go to rehab voluntarily.”
“And if she says no?” Justice asked.
“She’s going anyway.”
The room was quiet. Rita sipped her tea and didn’t say a word because Rita had already given her blessing when I’d called her this morning. She’d said “Do what you have to do. Just bring her back to me whole.”
Twenty minutes later we heard tires screech into the driveway. A car door slammed. Then footsteps—fast, frantic, damn near running—up the front walkway and through the door.
“GRANDMA?!” Serenity burst into the kitchen with tears already on her face and panic in her eyes and she looked at Rita sitting at the table sipping tea and alive and her whole body sagged with relief.
“Oh thank God. Oh my God, I thought—Quest said it was important and I thought something happened to you—”
“I’m fine, baby,” Rita said calmly. “Sit down.”
Serenity looked at Rita. Then at me. Then at Prime. Then at Justice. Three brothers sitting at a kitchen table with serious faces and their grandmother at the head. The relief on her face dissolved into something else as the realization hit.
“No.” She took a step back. “No, you’re not doing this.”
“Sit down, Ren,” I said.
“This is an intervention? Are you serious right now? You tricked me into coming here by making me think Grandma was—” She pointed at me, hand shaking. “That’s fucked up, Quest. That is so fucked up.”
“What’s fucked up is the bruise under your right eye,” Prime said.
His voice was low and steady and it cut through her anger like a blade.
“What’s fucked up is the bruises on your neck that you’re hiding under that scarf.
What’s fucked up is that you’re snorting coke with a man who beats you and you’re calling it love. ”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“Take the scarf off,” Justice said.
“What?”
“Take the scarf off, Serenity. Right now. Show us your neck.”
She stood there with her hand on the Hermes silk, fingers trembling, eyes darting between the three of us. Rita was still and silent at the head of the table, her cloudy eyes pointed in Serenity’s direction, seeing more than any of us even without her sight.
“I’m not taking off my scarf.”
“Then I’ll take it off for you,” Prime said, standing up.
“Don’t touch me!” She backed into the counter, arms crossed over her chest. “This is exactly what you always do! You don’t ask, you don’t listen, you just decide what’s best for me and force it! I’m a grown woman!”
“You’re a grown woman with finger marks on her throat,” I said. “And a coke habit. And a boyfriend who works for a criminal organization. So yeah, Ren. We’re deciding. Because your decisions are gonna get you killed.”
That landed. I saw it hit her like a physical thing, the flinch, the way her eyes filled, the way her shoulders dropped from defensive to defeated in the span of a breath.
”We have a bed waiting for you at a facility in Virginia,” I continued.
“Private. Discreet. Thirty-day program. You go today. Right now.”
“I’m not going to rehab. Y’all are out of your fuckin’ minds.” She grabbed her keys off the counter and headed for the door. “I’m leaving.”
I looked at Prime. He nodded.
Justice was already at the door before she got there, blocking it with his body and his arms crossed. She tried to push past him and he didn’t move. She hit his chest with both hands and he still didn’t move.
“Get out of my way, Justice!”
“I can’t do that, sis.”
She spun around toward the back door and Prime was there. She was boxed in, three brothers and a kitchen and nowhere to go. She looked at Rita, who was still sitting at the table with her tea, her cloudy eyes pointed straight ahead.
“Grandma, tell them to stop! Tell them they can’t do this to me!”
Rita sipped her tea. “Baby, I told them to do it.”
Serenity’s face collapsed. The last person she thought would be on her side had just confirmed she was alone in this room. She started crying deep, broken tears that came from a place you can’t fake.
“Please don’t do this,” she whispered. “Please.”
“I’m sorry, Ren.” I walked toward her and she swung on me.
Caught me in the chest with a fist that had more grief than force behind it.
I let her hit me twice more because she needed to and because I could take it.
Then I scooped her up. She kicked and screamed and clawed at my arms and called me every name in the book and a few that hadn’t been invented yet.
“PRIME! JUSTICE! SOMEBODY HELP ME! HE CAN’T DO THIS! GET OFF ME!”
Prime opened the front door. Justice popped the trunk of the Maybach. I carried my baby sister down the front steps of our grandmother’s house while she thrashed and screamed and I put her in the trunk as gently as I could while she fought me with everything she had.
“I HATE YOU! I HATE ALL OF YOU!”
“I know.” I looked at her in the trunk, mascara running, scarf pulled loose, the bruises on her neck visible now for all of us to see. Dark marks in the shape of fingers that made Prime turn away and Justice’s fists clench at his sides.
I closed the trunk.
Prime went home to his family, but Justice followed me in his Range Rover. And I drove to Virginia with my sister screaming and banging in the trunk and my hands steady on the steering wheel because somebody in this family had to be steady and it was always going to be me.
By the time we got to the facility, which was a private estate tucked into the Virginia countryside with manicured grounds and a main house that looked more like a hotel than a treatment center, the trunk had gone quiet.
I didn’t know if she’d cried herself out or fallen asleep or was just lying there in the dark hating me.
Any of those was fine. She was alive and she was here and that was all that mattered.
I opened the trunk. She looked up at me with swollen eyes and a face that had gone from furious to empty somewhere along I-66.
The bruises on her neck were dark against her skin in the afternoon sunlight and I had to look away for a second because the rage that went through me was not productive right now.
“We’re here,” I said. “Get out.”
She climbed out slowly and looked at the building and the grounds and the woman in scrubs waiting at the entrance with a clipboard.
“Here are your options,” I said. “Option one: you stay here for thirty days. You get clean. You break up with Mega. And when you come out, you come home to your family. Option two: you walk away right now and I put a bullet in Mega’s head before the sun comes up tomorrow.
That’s not a threat. That’s a schedule.”
“You can’t just—”
“Pick one, Serenity.”
She looked at me. Then at Justice, who was standing by his car with his hands in his pockets. Then back at the building.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll stay.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. And don’t visit me. I don’t want to see any of you.”
She walked toward the entrance without looking back. The woman in scrubs met her at the door, put a hand on her back, and guided her inside. The door closed.
Justice and I stood in the parking lot for a while. Neither of us spoke. A bird was singing somewhere in the trees and the afternoon sun was warm and everything about this place looked peaceful and nothing about how we got here felt like it.
“She’s gonna be okay,” Justice said.
“Yeah.”
“You did the right thing.”
“I know.”
What I didn’t say, what I’d never say out loud, was that putting Serenity in rehab didn’t solve the Mega problem. It just delayed it. My sister was safe for thirty days. And when those thirty days were up, I needed Mega to not exist anymore.
I wasn’t going to tell my brothers. I wasn’t going to discuss it or debate it or put it to a vote. When the time was right, I was going to handle it the way I handled everything that threatened my family.
Quietly. Permanently. And without losing a minute of sleep.
I check my phone to see if Mehar had responded to my text about dinner. She hadn’t. And she had me fucked up by not respondin’. I was headed to her ass next.