Chapter Twenty Old Wounds, New Roots
Pregnancy cracked something open in Mika that she hadn’t expected — a grief for her own mother that ran deeper than she’d let herself feel in years.
She found herself, in the quiet middle-of-the-night hours, mourning not the mother Gwen was, but the mother she’d never gotten to have: someone who would have sat with her through the nausea, who would have driven her to appointments, who would have wanted nothing from this except to be there.
She hadn’t spoken to Gwen since the phone call about the loan.
Dayvon texted occasionally — small, careful messages, no asks attached, and slowly, cautiously, she’d started answering them.
When she told him about the baby, he sent back three exclamation points and, unprompted, an apology for the day at the house that she hadn’t expected and hadn’t known she needed.
I didn’t know what mom was gonna do that day, he wrote. I should’ve said something. I’m proud of you sis. For real.
She cried reading it, grief and hope tangled together in a way she was learning, slowly, in her twice-a-month sessions above the laundromat.
You could grieve what you never had and still build something new. You could love your brother and keep your mother at a careful distance and not consider either choice a betrayal of the other.
Amir built a nursery himself, over three weekends, refusing every offer of professional help, insisting Pop’s hands and his hands were the only ones that should touch the crib their daughter would sleep in.
He painted the walls a soft, warm yellow and, without telling Mika, stenciled a single word above the window in careful, uneven letters: ROOTED.
“What’s that mean?” she asked, finding it finished one Saturday afternoon, her hand pressed to her rounding stomach.
“Means whatever happens out there,” he said, nodding vaguely toward the world, toward cameras and comment sections and family members with their hands out, “in here, she’s rooted. She’s ours. Ain’t nobody taking that from her.”
Mika thought of the twelve-year-old girl who’d watched a couch get carried to a curb, who’d spent her whole life believing she wasn’t allowed to take up space, and thought: my daughter will never once wonder if she belongs somewhere.
She would make sure of it, the same fierce way Amir had made sure of a title, a corner turned, a whole life rebuilt plank by plank out of nothing.
She drove past her old apartment once that summer, alone, on an errand that could have taken a different route, and sat outside it for a few minutes with the engine running, looking at the same stoop, the same window, the same stretch of curb where a stranger had once set down her family’s whole life like it weighed nothing.
The building looked smaller than she remembered.
Everything from childhood usually did, once you’d grown enough to measure it against something else.
She didn’t cry, though she’d half expected to.
She just sat there, hand on her stomach, and let herself feel the strange, quiet satisfaction of having outgrown a place without needing to hate it to leave it behind.
Then she drove home, to the yellow room with the word painted above the window, and didn’t look back again.