Chapter 45 Mehar
Mehar
Moving is humbling because it forces you to look at everything you’ve accumulated and decide what’s worth carrying into your next life.
I’d been packing for three days, sorting through closets and drawers and cabinets at the estate, filling boxes with things we were taking to the penthouse and trash bags with things we weren’t.
Quest was at the casino handling business, so I had the house to myself and the music loud and a system that involved labeling every box in pink marker because I was nothing if not organized about chaos.
I was clearing out the nightstand on his side of the bed when I found it.
A leather journal wedged behind a stack of old receipts and a charger cable that didn’t belong to anything we currently owned.
It was small, worn, with no name on the cover.
I almost tossed it in the trash bag without opening it because it looked like something from years ago that he’d forgotten about.
But something made me flip it open. Curiosity or instinct or whatever you want to call the thing that makes you read something you’re not supposed to read.
Janelle’s handwriting. I recognized it from the intake forms she’d had me fill out at our first therapy session.
Neat, precise, slightly slanted to the right.
This was her journal. Her private thoughts.
And Quest had it, which meant he’d taken it from somewhere or someone had given it to him and he’d shoved it in a drawer and hadn’t finished reading it because the receipts on top of it were from months ago.
I should’ve closed it. I should’ve put it back in the drawer and let Quest deal with it on his own timeline. But I didn’t. Because Janelle had chained me to a ceiling and used my therapy sessions against me and I wanted to know what else was inside this bitch’s head.
I sat on the edge of the bed and started reading.
Most of it was what I expected. Obsessive entries about Quest, about their relationship, about Quindon.
She wrote about their son with a grief that was so raw it almost made me feel sorry for her.
Almost. Until I got to the entry dated three weeks before Quindon died.
I read it twice because the first time my brain refused to process it.
Quindon was sick. He needed a bone marrow transplant.
The doctors had tested Janelle and Quest and neither was a match.
But there was another option. The biological father.
The man Janelle had slept with, the man whose DNA actually ran through Quindon’s veins.
He’d been tested quietly through a back channel Janelle had arranged.
And he was a match. A perfect match. The transplant could have saved Quindon’s life.
But Janelle didn’t tell anyone. She didn’t call the father.
She didn’t arrange the transplant. She let her son die rather than reveal who the real father was because revealing the father meant revealing the affair and revealing the affair meant losing Quest and losing Quest was worse than losing Quindon.
She wrote it plainly. No code, no metaphor. She weighed her son’s life against her man’s love and chose the man.
I closed the journal and sat there with it in my hands and felt something cold settle behind my ribs. I’d been angry before. I’d beaten a man to death and shot two more in a ditch on Route 50. But this was different. This rage was quiet. It didn’t scream. It calculated.
Quest could never see this.
If he read this entry, he would go to war.
He would find Janelle and kill her and Mekhi would come for him and everything they’d rebuilt over the last month would collapse.
The truce, the peace, Bryce’s safety—all of it gone because of a dead woman’s journal and a truth that was fourteen years too late to fix anything.
Quindon was dead. Nothing in these pages could bring him back. The only thing this truth could do was create more death. More blood. More broken families and more children growing up without parents. And I was done contributing to that cycle.
I stood up and walked to the bathroom and dropped the journal in the trash can. It landed with a soft thud on top of the pregnancy test I’d taken that morning.
Two pink lines on a white stick. Positive.
I looked down at the trash can. A dead baby’s truth sitting next to a living baby’s beginning.
The worst secret I’d ever read lying on top of the best news I’d ever received.
I stared at them both for a long time and then I put the lid on the trash can and closed the door on Janelle’s confession forever.
Quest would never know what Janelle did. He would never carry the weight of knowing his son could have been saved. He had enough ghosts. I wasn’t adding another one.
But tonight, when he came home from the casino and walked through the door and kissed me the way he always did, I was going to sit him down and tell him something that would change his life in the opposite direction.
Something that started with two pink lines and ended with everything he thought he’d never have.
I put my hand on my stomach and stood in the bathroom of a house we were leaving and smiled at a future we were walking into.
A penthouse overlooking the river. A ring on my finger.
A baby in my belly. And a man who reversed a vasectomy because I asked him to in the dark one night and he said yes before his brain could talk his heart out of it.
Tonight was going to be a good night.