13. And Yet, We Stray
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
AND YET, WE STRAY
“ T oday must have crack in it,” Trevor said to himself.
By midmorning, he already knew the day had teeth. Sharp ones too, like Eddie Murphy in Vampire in Brooklyn , because what the actual fuck was going on?
It started with the email.
He stood near the monitor in the Lower East Side studio while the sculptor shaped a slab of wet clay into the slow curve of a woman’s shoulder.
The room smelled like damp earth and plaster, and the air carried that particular hush artists made when they were deep in it, when their hands were doing the thinking and everybody else knew better than to interrupt.
Behind him, Marcus adjusted a lens with quiet precision while the camera hummed low and steady.
Trevor’s phone buzzed in his palm with the ordinary impatience of production, another message in a long line of messages that usually needed solving, shifting, approving, fixing.
He glanced down without thinking much of it.
Then he saw the subject line.
The artist in London had pulled out.
Just like that.
Trevor read the email once. Then again, slower the second time, his jaw tightening the longer the words sat on the screen.
Months of coordination. Flights. Holds. Interviews arranged through too many people in too many time zones.
All of it gone because the artist suddenly had a “scheduling conflict,” which was clean professional language for this is not your problem to unpack, but it absolutely just became your problem to fix .
Hassan—his new assistant—noticed the shift in him first, “Something wrong?”
Trevor lowered the phone and exhaled through his nose, trying to keep his irritation from spreading all over a set that had nothing to do with London. Across the room, metal scraped gently against clay. Somebody near the lighting rig whispered a question. “Our UK segment just died.”
Hassan blinked, “You’re serious?”
“Completely.”
For a moment Trevor just stood there listening to the studio breathe.
The scrape of tools, the low motor of the camera, the soft foot traffic over concrete.
It should have calmed him. Normally it would have.
Instead it made the frustration inside him louder, because that segment mattered.
It had been one of the first things he wrote down when Making Love: The Art of Us was still just a title in his notebook and a risk in his chest. A conversation about art and intimacy stretching beyond boroughs and borders.
Love translated through process, through distance, through Black hands making beauty anyway.
Now it was gone.
Trevor dragged a hand down his face and texted production before he could think too hard about it.
Cut it.
There wasn’t time to rebuild overseas this late in the game. He knew that. Logically, it made sense. Emotionally, it felt like somebody had pulled a thread loose from the center seam and expected him to act like the whole thing wouldn’t eventually come apart.
His phone buzzed again. It was Aniyah.
Roxanne : Should I move the chair closer to the window or is the couch better for lighting?
A second message came through immediately after.
Roxanne : Also I’m nervous.
Trevor rubbed the back of his neck.
Of course she was nervous. Tonight was the night they were filming her segment at the condo, the poetry piece he had been fighting all week to keep from getting cut every time the network started talking about “momentum” and “episode shape” like intimacy was somehow dead weight.
Her part was the heartbeat of that episode.
The soft center. The truth of it. He refused to lose it.
He started typing back, wanting to tell her the chair was fine, the window light would be beautiful on her skin and that she would be amazing once she started talking because she always was. Then another call came through from the office halting all of those thoughts .
Trevor answered with a clipped, “Yeah.”
“Trevor,” the coordinator said quickly, already sounding like she wanted no parts of whatever she was about to hand off, “we’ve got someone here asking for you.”
He frowned, “Who?”
“A Katelyn Porter.”
Trevor closed his eyes.
Of-fucking-course.
As he stepped out of the elevator, Katelyn was pacing the reception area like she could wear a hole through the floor before he made it downstairs. The first thing he noticed was how different she looked. The careful polish she used to keep on like armor had cracked somewhere along the way.
Her hair was twisted into a loose bun that was halfway to giving up, strands falling around her face, and the makeup under her eyes had smudged enough to make it obvious she either hadn’t slept or had cried until nothing held.
When she saw him, she rushed forward like she’d been keeping herself upright out of spite alone, “Trevor.”
His chest tightened on instinct, old habit and old history moving before thought, “What are you doing here?”
“I needed to talk to you.”
“This isn’t the place,” his voice stayed even, but his body had already gone on alert taking in everyone around them. Receptionist behind the desk. Two assistants pretending not to look. Glass walls everywhere. Of all places this is where she wanted to show her ass.
“I didn’t know where else to go,” her voice cracked on the last word and for one ugly second that familiar reflex rose in him—that old urge to reach out, calm her down, fix it before it got worse. He hated how quickly it still lived in his bones.
“You could’ve called. ”
“You blocked me,” she laughed, bitter and ragged. “Remember?”
Trevor rubbed his temple. “Katelyn?—”
“My life is falling apart!” She shouted, and every head in the reception area found something suddenly fascinating to stare at except the scene right in front of them. She didn’t care. “Do you hear me? It’s falling apart and you’re acting like none of this matters.”
His jaw flexed, “Lower your voice.”
“No,” tears brimmed and spilled almost as quickly as the words came. “You were supposed to love me for life. That’s what you promised me. You don’t just walk away after one rough patch.”
Trevor looked at her for a long time. One rough patch. The phrase sat so wrong in his chest it almost made him laugh.
“One rough patch?” He repeated quietly.
Her hands flew up, “I made mistakes. I know I did. I know that. But I’ve learned my lesson, Trevor. I have. We can fix this. We can go back to how things were.”
For a second, the room blurred around the edges.
Because he remembered her.
Not this woman unraveling in his office lobby, but the girl.
The one who used to wait for him after school.
The one whose hand fit into his so easy back when life felt survivable because they were surviving it together.
The one he spent years trying to protect from a world that had been too rough, too loud, too cruel too soon.
He remembered all of that in one sharp rush, and before he could stop it, a tear slipped loose and tracked hot down his cheek.
Katelyn saw it and grabbed it like a lifeline, “See?” She whispered, stepping closer. “You still love me.”
Trevor wiped his face slowly, “I do.”
Her whole body sagged with relief .
But he kept talking.
“Just not the way you want anymore.”
The words landed between them and stayed there. Heavy and final. Katelyn stared at him like she hadn’t expected the truth to sound so plain.
“Trevor—”
“I spent half my life trying to save you,” he said softly, and that was the part that hurt, the part he hadn’t been able to name until now.
“Since we were kids. I wore that cape so long I forgot I even had it on.” Her expression cracked a little wider, but he didn’t stop.
He couldn’t. “I would’ve given you anything.
Everything your heart wanted. I would’ve bent myself into whatever shape made you feel safe and protected inside my world. ”
His chest tightened. He thought of all the years he confused love with rescue. Thought of how tired that kind of love left a man.
“I can’t do that anymore.”
Her face collapsed, “So that’s it?”
“That’s it for us.”
Katelyn shook her head hard enough to send tears flying, “You’re choosing someone else over me.”
“This isn’t about another woman.”
“Then what is it about?”
Trevor held her gaze and gave her the only answer that mattered. “Zara.”
That silenced her.
He took a breath and let his daughter anchor him all the way back into himself, “If you get yourself together—really together—we can talk about visitation. I want my daughter to know her mother. I do. But I’m not doing this with you like this.
Not in lobbies. Not in chaos. Not while you’re still making your mess everybody else’s emergency. ”
Katelyn’s lips trembled, “You’d really turn your back on me? ”
Trevor’s voice stayed calm, and maybe that was the part that made it final, “If you keep showing up like this, I’ll file a protection order.”
The words shattered whatever control she had left.
She broke open right there, sobbing, cursing, saying his name like it could still pull him back toward her if she said it enough ways.
Trevor turned toward the elevator before his body could betray him with one last instinct to comfort pain that was no longer his responsibility to carry.
When he passed the receptionist, she was looking at him with pity—he absolutely hated it.
“Call security and revoke her visitation access.” Katelyn continued to cry in the lobby.
Her voice followed him down the hallway, ragged with grief and fury, bouncing off the glass walls while he kept walking.
He didn’t turn back.
Some doors only closed once.
This one was closed for good.