When I stepped onto the sidewalk outside that law office, a black Mercedes pulled smoothly to the curb, a driver in a tailored suit already rounding the hood to open the rear door.
“Miss Boyd, your transport is ready,” he said.
Marcus followed me outside, his face twisting through several stages of disbelief in the space of about four seconds.
“Where did you get money for something like this?” he demanded, standing on the sidewalk in his good suit, still smelling faintly of the cologne I’d bought him three Christmases ago.
I gave him no answer. Maya was already buckled into the back seat, seven years old and quiet in the particular way children get when they sense something enormous shifting around them without fully understanding what. Elijah, four, was busy negotiating with the driver about whether he could sit up front “just this once,” a negotiation he lost gracefully.
“We’ll talk when you’re ready to actually listen,” I told Marcus, which was the closest thing to an answer he was going to get.
I got in the car, and we pulled away from the curb toward the airport, toward a flight I’d booked six weeks earlier, toward a house on Saint Averil that had been waiting patiently for a Boyd woman to finally need it.
While I was somewhere over open water with my children asleep against my shoulders, the entire Coleman family was gathering at a private maternity clinic back in Harrow Point, seven of them crowded into a waiting room meant for maybe four, waiting to meet the child they’d already started celebrating as the family’s long-awaited heir.
Marcus told me all of this later, weeks afterward, in a phone call I almost didn’t answer. I’ve pieced the rest together from what Yvette eventually admitted, in the kind of confession that only comes once pride has nothing left to protect.
Marcus walked into the ultrasound room glowing, Whitney reclined on the exam table beside him, her hand already resting protectively over her rounded belly.
“Doctor, is my son healthy?” Marcus asked, practically bouncing on his heels. “Look at those shoulders on the screen there. He’s going to be strong, isn’t he?”
Dr. Nathaniel Okoro, a careful, soft-spoken man who’d delivered half the babies in three surrounding counties over the past decade, smiled politely and moved the transducer across Whitney’s abdomen, checking measurements against the chart in front of him.
His smile started to falter around the third measurement.
