“You two broke up?” I ask, keeping my voice steady.
The way to Iris is actually clear for the first time since we met. He throws a piercing look over his shoulder at me, his smirk a forced lift of his lips when his eyes don’t smile at all.
“We’re not together anymore,” he replies. “But she doesn’t want to be found by anyone.” He turns to face me now and crosses his arm over his chest. “And that includes you, West. Did you think because she gave you a few minutes in the closet you meant something to her? You didn’t.”
A practiced smirk lifts one corner of his mouth.
“She has my money and my kid, so I guess she doesn’t need me anymore.” He shakes his head. “Who would’ve thought I’d let some swamp whore from Louisiana trap me? I suspect that Creole bitch even gave it up to my bodyguard while I was gone.”
I lunge for him, ignoring the twitch in my knee and slam him to the wall, then pin him by the throat.
“You’re a liar,” I grit out, tightening my fingers around his neck. “Say it again and I’ll break more than a leg, you entitled son of a bitch. You’re not good enough to touch her.”
“But I did touch her.” A demon’s smile teases the corners of his mouth. “Oh, I’ve touched her everywhere you’ve never gotten to. Fucked her in all the ways you’ve only dreamt about, and to top it all off? She had my baby.”
He cocks a brow, regaining his arrogance by the second. I hate his handsome face, his blond hair and blue eyes and tan skin. I hate everything outwardly appealing about him because inside he’s crawling with worms.
“Write her off, West,” he says. “She’s gone. She got what she needed, and now she’s gone.”
Iris is not like that. I know she’s not, but why didn’t she try to get in touch with me? If she’s gone . . . after what happened in the closet? Would she just leave without even saying goodbye? Without telling me how to find her? Was I that wrong about what we had? Maybe I’ve been misreading this woman since the night we met. I just knew that what I felt, she was feeling, too.
You’re not fooling yourself.
She told me that. Her whispered words spark again in my memory, and all the feelings, the sensations, the perfection of those moments in the closet with her flood my mind. I wasn’t fooling myself. I don’t know everything that’s going on, but there’s one thing I hold onto even as I exit the training facility and Jared and I pull out of the parking lot.
I’ll see her again.
That thread that connects us, glowing neon, it’s still there. I may not be able to see it, but Ifeelit. It’s still wrapped around me.
Wherever Iris is, I hope it’s wrapped around her, too.
HALFTIME
“She remembered who she was and the game changed.”
--Lalah Delia
Iris
One Year Later
MiMi saysshe was tutored by the bayou, by the Mississippi itself. She says that river is the blood meandering through Louisiana’s veins, and it casts a spell on all who love it.
I don’t know that I everlovedLouisiana. I never knew this Louisiana. I lived in the Ninth. On the bayou, a thick carpet of green grass squishes between my bare toes; in the city there was concrete under my feet, cracked and unforgiving.
An arch of cypress trees shelters the path from MiMi’s small house down to the river, but in my neighborhood growing up, power lines crisscrossed the sky like electric spaghetti. No, I didn’t love the Lower Ninth, but I think I’m falling for the bayou.
There are so many differences between the city and St. Martine. Being here the last year, I understand why Lo saw living with our great-grandmother as a blessing.
How she must have laughed when I claimed to know MiMi as well as she does. What a ridiculous notion. When we showed up on her modest doorstep, I barely recognized her. I don’t know exactly how old she is, but traces of great beauty still remain on her face, even past ninety years old. She has fewer wrinkles than she should, her skin carrying the patina of age, shined to a high polish.
And her eyes—those eyes can see your soul in the dark.
Lo hadn’t told her much about my circumstances, except that I needed to come home. But when I stood on the front porch and the blue door to MiMi’s green house swung open, her eyes probed mine in the dim porch light. That omniscient gaze sliced through the humid, heavy air, narrowing and softening with every new thing she read in my soul and dug out of my heart.
Her thin arms drew me close, and she whispered to me in French. I didn’t understand what she said. I didn’t need to. The power of her voice, the life in her words, winnowed to the bottomless pit where I hid my hurt. Before I knew it, my pain and disillusionment, my disappointment and regret, poured out of me into the silver braid hanging over her shoulder.
“Maman?”
