Chapter Sixteen The Ask
They came back three weeks later, and this time they didn’t bother with the warmth.
Gwen called Mika’s cell — a number she hadn’t used in over a year — and asked, without preamble, if Mika could “talk to Amir” about a loan.
Eight thousand dollars, for Dayvon, who’d gotten himself into some trouble.
For some reason, Gwen was deliberately vague about it and that trouble was something that Mika, had spent her whole childhood learning to read especially the specific vagueness of her mother’s voice.
Mika understood immediately that this meant something bad.
“I’m not asking him for anything,” Mika said.
“Why not? He got it. Y’all living good now. What’s eight thousand dollars to a man making eighty at a time?”
“That’s not how this works, Mom. That’s not how any of this works.”
“You always did think you was better than us.” Gwen’s voice sharpened into the old, familiar cruelty, the one that had taught twelve-year-old Mika to make herself small and quiet and no trouble at all.
“Went off to that fancy school, got yourself a rich man, and now you too good to help your own brother.”
“I put myself through school on loans and three jobs while you told everybody I thought I was better than you for wanting to go,” Mika said, and something in her voice had changed since the last time they’d had this fight — steadier now, less afraid.
“I’m not doing this. I’m not asking him.
And I need you to hear me: if you come back around him with your hand out one more time, I’m done. All the way done.”
“You’d choose him over your own family?”
“I’m choosing myself,” Mika said. “For the first time in my whole life, I’m choosing myself.”
She hung up shaking, and cried harder than she had in years, grieving a mother who had never once, not in twenty-six years, shown up for her without an angle.
Amir found her like that an hour later and didn’t say a word — just held her on the kitchen floor until the shaking stopped, and then made her a plate of food she didn’t have the strength to make herself, and sat with her while she ate every bite.
“I’m proud of you,” he said finally.
“For yelling at my mom?”
“For choosing yourself.” He kissed the top of her head. “Took me ’til I was twenty-two to learn how to do that. You learned it at twenty-six with a lot less help than I had.”
Dayvon texted her once more, two weeks later — not asking for money this time, just three words: sorry about mom.
She didn’t answer right away. But she saved the number, and something small and stubborn in her chest hoped, quietly, that one door in her family might still be worth leaving open, even if the other had to close for good.
What Mika didn’t know until later was that Gwen had tried Amir directly, too — a message to an old management email still listed on an outdated press kit, framed as a concerned mother “just wanting to make sure her daughter was being taken care of financially.” Amir forwarded it to Nina without a word of reply, and Nina, without asking permission, blocked the address and told Pop, who told Tre, until the whole crew had quietly closed ranks around Mika without her ever having to ask.
She found out three months later, by accident, when Nina mentioned it in passing like it was nothing. “Why didn’t anybody tell me?” Mika asked, something tight rising in her chest.
“Because it wasn’t gonna change anything except make you carry more weight,” Nina said, gentle but unapologetic. “We handled it so you didn’t have to. That’s what family does, Mika. Sometimes protecting somebody means not making them relive the thing you already took care of.”
Mika didn’t know whether to be angry or grateful. In the end she landed, mostly, on grateful — a new and unfamiliar feeling, letting people carry something for her without keeping score.