Skye
a few weeks later…
“Daddy, my feets hurt.”
“I’m sorry, baby. Get on my back, we’re almost done,” he said as we headed out of the mall our daughter insisted we stop at.
Upland was nothing like I’d built it up to be in my head. Kareem had driven us through wide, clean streets lined with magnolias, past restaurants with valets and storefronts I recognized.
By the time we pulled up to Ducane’s house, a massive estate lined with glass windows that caught the afternoon sun and threw it back, I’d stopped bracing and started gawking.
For six years, saying this city’s name left a rotten taste in my mouth. The city that took him. The place his father exiled him to. I’d pictured somewhere gray and cold, a place a man goes to disappear. But this wasn’t that.
“Close your mouth, Spot.” He was already out, reaching back for Cadence.
“I guess I didn’t realize you lived like this.” I felt insecure, and I didn’t know why. Ducane had always come from money. None of this should’ve surprised me. But it did.
“We live like this now,” he said, pulling me in to kiss my forehead.
“I’m proud of you, Ducane. Really proud.”
“Skye, look at me. All of this is just shit. Wood, glass, and cement. You and her, our future, are the reason I smile now. Not this house, the cars. None of this shit ever meant anything to me.”
I grabbed his hand and let him lead us inside. The home was beautiful, gave just enough bachelor but still felt like it was designed for a family one day. He placed Cadence on her feet and led us to a door with a cursive C on it.
“Oh, Daddy, is it a surprise?”
“Yep. Close your eyes.”
Cadence bounced from leg to leg, braids and beads swinging, squeezing his hand. Watching them together, that same stubborn tilt to both their chins, undid me a little.
He opened the door, and I gasped at the over-the-top princess room.
“Open your eyes, Sugar.”
She screamed when she opened her eyes and rushed in with us right behind her.
“A princess room!”
Purple and pink walls, the exact shades Cadence would’ve picked herself.
A canopy bed shaped like a little castle.
A reading nook full of cloud pillows and a shelf already stocked with the books she loved.
A night-light in the shape of a fat crescent moon.
Her name on the wall in gold cursive letters.
And more stuffies than she’d ever seen in her life.
Cadence lost her entire mind. She ran in circles, climbed into the castle bed, came back out, hugged the moon, and declared it the best room in the history of rooms before flinging herself face-first into the cloud pillows.
I stood in the doorway and couldn’t get a word out.
He’d built her a room. In his world. Before I’d even agreed to come.
“You good?” Ducane’s voice came low behind me.
“Yeah.” I wiped my face, before Cadence could see. “It’s perfect, Ducane. She’s never gonna want to leave.”
“That’s the idea.” He kissed the side of my head and let it go before I could spiral on what it meant. He led me to our bedroom, and it was just as beautiful as the rest of the home.
As we stepped further in, the lights came on overhead. The chocolate-and-cream color scheme was gorgeous, and the California king was going to be my favorite thing in the house — until he showed me the closet.
“I didn’t forget about you, Spot.”
The closet was full. Clothes, shoes, purses, jewelry, all of it. I jumped into his arms, and a whole hot and heavy make-out session broke out right there among the racks, grinding and kissing like two teenagers who’d just found an empty room.
“I love it all. Thank you.”
He caged me in, arms braced on either side of my head and pressed another agonizingly slow kiss to my lips before finally pulling back.
“Can I take you out tonight? Show you the town.” He asked, touching my hair and then my nose.
“Like a date?”
“Exactly like a date. That’s the secret to a good marriage, wife. Never stop dating.”
I ran my hands over his shoulders and smiled.
“I don’t know if that’s the secret, but I’d love to enjoy a nice dinner with my husband. But what about Cadence?”
“Lola can watch her. As many times as I’ve allowed her nieces to come to the office, she owes me. That’s if you’re comfortable.”
“If you trust her, so do I.”
“Okay, it’s a date,” he said, pulling his phone out and helping me down. I went to check in on Cadence and found her in her reading nook.
“Hey, Sugar. What are you doing?”
“I’m coloring myself as a princess,” she said, showing me the coloring book that I realized was all of her in different outfits and settings.
“You’ve got such a good daddy.”
“The best. But I got the best mommy too.”
“Thank you, love. Would you mind if Mommy and Daddy went out for a little while? Miss Lola would stay with you.”
She looked up from her coloring book, crayon paused mid-stroke.
“You’re coming back, right?”
“Always, baby.”
“Okay.” She was already back to coloring. “Can I stay up a little late so we can play nails?”
“Yes, but only an extra hour. We’ve got a busy weekend.”
“Okay, mommy.”
I stood and exited the room, still in shock that we were here and here together. Life was crazy like that, but I wasn’t complaining. As nervous as I was, I knew this weekend was important to Ducane. I was here to support him if nothing else.
Lola showed up at seven sharp in flats and a cardigan, a tote of crafts and snacks over her shoulder, looking nothing like the woman who terrified grown executives over the phone.
“Go,” she told us, already setting up a tea party on Cadence’s new floor. “She’s in good hands. I’ve got three nieces. Nothing this child can do that I haven’t already seen.”
Cadence didn’t even look up to say bye to us. Traitor.
Ducane took me to a place downtown with no sign on the door, just a host who knew him by name and walked us straight back to a corner booth.
The lighting was low and gold. A jazz trio played in the corner.
He ordered for both of us without looking at a menu and reached across the table to hold my hand the whole time, his thumb running over my knuckles.
“So.” He watched me over his glass. “What do you think? Of all of it.”
“It’s a lot fancier than I expected.” I shrugged, playing it down, even as I kept softening toward him more than I planned to. “I thought I’d hate this place.”
“I did.”
“Really?”
“Hell yeah, and for a while. Then I got tired of letting grief make every decision for me.” He smiled without much humor. “So, I built a good life anyway. Call it spite. Call it survival. Either way...it worked.”
I was about to respond when a shadow fell over the table.
“Nah. Tell me my eyes are deceiving me.”
I looked up, and into a face I’d seen on three album covers and about a hundred billboards. Mudd. In the flesh, in a restaurant, grinning down at my husband like he’d found money in an old coat.
Ducane stood, and the two of them did that handshake-into-hug thing men do when the love is real.
“Man, you supposed to be laying low.”
“I’m a free citizen, thanks to you.” Mudd’s eyes cut to me, and his whole face changed, warm, curious. “And who is this? Because this ain’t the same energy you been walking around with, brother. You used to come to my spot looking like the IRS.”
“Watch it.” Ducane’s hand found mine as pulled me up and placed a hand on the small of my back. “Mudd, this is my wife. Skye. Skye, this is Mudd.”
I watched it land on him. Wife. His eyebrows went up, and he looked at Ducane with a smirk and then back at me.
“Call me Joseph.”
“Alright, let me tell Alexis you’re over here flirting with my wife. Call you Joseph. Fuck outta here.” Ducane laughed. So did Mudd, “I’ll even be her attorney for when she peels your shit back.”
“That’s cold.” Mudd laughed but took my hand, gentle, almost reverent.
“Skye. It’s a real pleasure. Your husband saved my life.
You should know that. He walked into a federal courtroom with the whole world betting against me and walked me out a free man.
Best in the business. And clearly,” he pointed his glass at me, “he’s got better taste than I gave him credit for. ”
“He has his moments,” I said. “There was this one tim…”
“Aight, enough of y’all feeding off each other.”
Mudd threw his head back and laughed, loud enough that the jazz trio almost lost their place.
“Oh, I like her.” He pointed at Ducane. “You keep this one. And bring her to the show next month, both of you. VIP. I owe you about a hundred favors. I’m starting with that.
” He squeezed my hand once more. “Take care of him, Skye. He’s one of the good ones.
Rare in his line of work. Rare in mine too. Solid nigga.”
“We square bruh. Just stay out the way and trust me on that other thing.”
They talked in code for a few minutes. And then he was gone, swallowed back into the low-lit room, leaving me staring after him.
“You’re a big deal sugar cane,” I said, warm all over.
“I just did my job.” But he couldn’t hide the pride in it, and I didn’t want him to.
“Ducane Simmons. The lawyer who beat the feds for Mudd.” I sat back, taking him in. He’d built a whole life out here without me, a version of him I was only now getting to meet. “I’m pleased to get acquainted with this version of you.”
“You know the only version that matters.” He brought my hand back to his mouth. “But yeah. This is the life I made when I couldn’t have the one I wanted. The firm’s mine now in everything but name. The entertainment side’s about to blow all the way up. Mudd was just the first.”
He turned my hand over, kissed my palm, and looked at me like he was choosing his words carefully.
“So, I gotta ask you something, and I don’t need an answer tonight.” He took a breath. “Could you see it? You, me, Cadence. A life out here. Not instead of Coupeville. Alongside it. Could you ever see yourself living here?”
There it was. The real reason for the room. The dinner with no sign. The whole night, laid at my feet like a question.
And God help me, after the beautiful streets, being added to his home in ways, then watching a platinum artist call my husband a solid nigga, I almost said yes right there. But I’d learned the hard way what it cost to make a decision about this family before I had the full picture.
“Ask me again after the gala,” I said, and squeezed his hand so he’d know it wasn’t a no. “Let’s see how your daddy does with all of us in one room. Then I’ll tell you what I can see.”
He studied me for a second, then nodded. It wasn’t the answer he wanted, but the one he respected.
“Can I hold you to that?” he asked, sipping his drink.
“You can hold me to that.”
Neither one of us said what we were both thinking. That the gala could go a hundred ways, and only a few of them ended with me ever wanting to set foot in a room with Ruben Simmons again.