Chapter 39 Vivica
Vivica
Every single one of them had turned their backs on me. Every last one. The children I birthed, raised, sacrificed for, bled for. The children who would have nothing if it weren’t for me and the choices I made to build the life they inherited. Ungrateful. All of them.
Quest likes to talk about how cold I was.
How I never showed affection. How I manipulated him and pushed him away.
But if I hadn’t been hard on that boy, he would’ve been soft.
He would’ve been one of those weak men who inherits a company and runs it into the ground because nobody ever taught him how to survive.
I made him tough. I made him strategic. I made him ruthless.
And when his father’s debts were drowning Banks Reserve, who do you think pushed the business permits through city council so the liquor licenses could expand?
Who do you think made the phone calls to get the distribution contracts approved?
Me. From the mayor’s office. Using my power to build his empire while he was still a teenager learning how to tie a Windsor knot.
And I helped get Alexander killed. I’ll own that.
The man was cheating on me with everything that moved and I was tired of it.
Had I not removed him from the equation, Quest would never have taken over the company.
He would’ve spent his twenties watching his father drink away the profits and chase secretaries while the debt piled up.
I gave Quest the throne by clearing the man who was sitting on it. He should be thanking me.
Then there’s Prime. My second-born. The one who loves to tell people I threw him away.
I sent him to Rashid because Rashid could teach him things I couldn’t.
How to fight. How to kill. How to survive in a world that eats soft men alive.
Was it hard? Yes. Did it break something in him?
Probably. But look at what he became. A weapon.
A protector. A man that nobody in their right mind would cross.
I did that. I made sure that he wasn’t a pussy.
And Justice. My quiet one. The one who watched everything and said nothing and buried his feelings so deep that even I couldn’t find them.
I withheld my love from that boy on purpose.
Made it so the only way he could earn my attention was through excellence.
Straight As weren’t enough. Top of his class wasn’t enough.
He had to be extraordinary because ordinary was unacceptable in my house.
He got into Wharton, the best business school in the country, and I skipped his graduation.
I did that deliberately. Because he needed to understand that achievement is expected, not celebrated.
You don’t get a trophy for doing what you’re supposed to do.
My mother taught me that. When I would come home with good grades she’d look at my report card and set it on the table without smiling and say “well, that’s what you’re supposed to do.
It ain’t like you have anything else to do around here but go to school.
I gotta work twelve-hour days at the dry cleaners.
You don’t congratulate me when I put dinner on the table. ”
And she was right. Those were our obligations.
My mother couldn’t read. My father worked construction until his back gave out and then he worked construction some more because that’s what men with no education and three children did.
They worked until their bodies quit and then they died.
Both of them were gone before they turned sixty.
Never met their grandchildren. Never saw me become mayor.
Never saw the house I bought or the life I built or the empire their daughter created from nothing but ambition and the refusal to be ordinary.
I wonder sometimes if my children would have made them proud.
If my mother would have softened when she held Quest for the first time.
If my father would have smiled watching Prime throw a football in the backyard.
If either of them would have looked at what I built and said “we’re proud of you, Vivica. You did good.”
They wouldn’t have. Because that’s not who they were.
And that’s not who I became. The cycle doesn’t break just because you want it to.
It breaks when someone is brave enough to admit it exists.
And I was never brave in that way. I was brave in every other way.
Brave enough to run a city. Brave enough to bury bodies.
Brave enough to make decisions that would have paralyzed lesser women.
But I was never brave enough to hold my children and tell them I loved them without attaching conditions.
That’s my sin. Not the scheming, not the manipulation, not the bodies.
My sin is that I had four children and I turned every single one of them into a project instead of a person.
And now they’ve turned their backs on me and I’m sitting in a prison cell talking to a lawyer about a murder I didn’t commit while the family I built continues to function without me.
That last part is what burns the most. They don’t need me. They never needed me. They just needed me gone.
Serenity. My baby girl. The one who looked just like me.
Same almond-shaped eyes, same high cheekbones, same soft mahogany skin.
When she was little, people would stop us on the street and say “she’s your twin.
” And I loved that because Serenity was proof that Vivica Banks could create something beautiful.
She was smart and sassy and ambitious and I saw myself in her so clearly that sometimes it scared me.
But I sent her away. I sent her to Ashford because I needed Alexander’s full attention and Serenity was stealing it.
She was daddy’s girl and every time he looked at her with that softness in his eyes, I felt it being taken from me.
So I packed her bags and shipped her to Connecticut and told myself it was for the best. Only the best for my children.
And what did she do up there? Got seduced by a teacher.
Let some thirty-two-year-old man read her poetry and whisper in her ear until she spread her legs and got pregnant at fifteen.
Like a fool. I flew up there and handled it.
I arranged the adoption. I called Dante.
And when she killed that man in that cabin with a kitchen knife and called me crying, I drove through the night and cleaned up the mess because that’s what mothers do.
They protect their children even when their children make catastrophic decisions.
I buried a body for that girl. Dante and I wrapped a dead man in plastic and put him in a trunk and made him disappear.
I forged documents. I paid people off. I erased an entire human being from existence so that my daughter could go back to school and pretend nothing happened.
And now she sits across from me in a visitation room and calls me Vivica like I’m a stranger.
Like I didn’t save her life. Like I didn’t carry her secret for twelve years without ever once using it against her.
But I know where that body is. I know the cabin. I know the timeline. I know which knife she used and where Dante drove afterward and which jurisdiction the body ended up in. I have receipts that trace every step of the cleanup. I kept them for insurance and protection. Leverage for a rainy day.
It’s pouring now.
And Banks Reserve. My ex-husband’s company that my sons turned into a criminal enterprise while hiding behind premium bourbon and a family name.
I know how the money moves. I know which trucks carry product that doesn’t appear on any manifest. I know the shell companies, the offshore accounts, the distribution routes.
I know because I was the mayor who approved the permits and the wife who watched it being built from the dining room table.
One phone call. That’s all it would take.
“Vivica.” Gerald’s voice cut through my thoughts. “Did you hear what I said?”
I blinked and refocused. Gerald was sitting across from me with his notepad and his pen and his cautious optimism. We were in the consultation room going over trial preparation. He’d been talking for several minutes and I hadn’t heard a word because I was somewhere else. Somewhere darker.
“Yes,” I said. “You want to put me on the stand and we need to prepare for cross-examination.”
“Correct. The prosecution is going to come at you hard. They’re going to bring up the text messages with India, the affair, the political fallout.
They’ll try to paint you as a woman scorned who killed her lover to protect her career.
We need to reframe the narrative. You’re a public servant who was targeted by political enemies.
India is alive somewhere and the prosecution can’t prove otherwise. ”
“I can handle cross-examination, Gerald. I’ve handled worse.”
“I believe you can. But I need you focused. The trial is in two weeks and your freedom depends on the next fourteen days of preparation. Are you with me?”
I looked at him. This expensive, competent man who thought he was preparing me for a trial.
He had no idea what I was actually preparing for.
The trial was the beginning, not the end.
If I walked out of here a free woman, and I was going to walk out of here a free woman, the first thing I would do is not open a consulting firm or run for city council or rebuild my reputation.
The first thing I would do is burn down everything my children built and rebuild it with myself at the center. The way it should have been from the start.
“I’m with you, Gerald,” I said. And I smiled at him. A warm, composed, mayoral smile that I’d perfected over two decades of public life.
He smiled back. But I noticed him shift in his chair, just slightly, the way people do when something about a smile doesn’t reach the eyes and their body registers the disconnect before their brain does.
Smart man. He should be uncomfortable.