“Kyleigh…”
“No,” I cut in. “Don’t ‘Kyleigh’ me. He remembers that day differently. You tried to give him money to stay away, Daddy? You… you said if he cared about me, he’d realize it was best to leave me alone. You said that, Daddy? Knowing I was at home with our baby w?—”
He cleared his throat, spoke in a rush. “You were headed toBrown, Kyleigh. Brown University. Yourdreamschool?—”
But I didn’t wanna hear that. “He said he walked away because he believed you when you said I was happy.”
“Kyleigh, listen to me.”
I was beyond listening as the reality of what he had done began to settle over me, my heart breaking. My hands gripped my comforter, like I was scared to ask what came next because I was. “He also remembers not saying a single disrespectful word about me. So, I’m going to ask you exactly once. Did you lie to me?”
On the other end of the line, my father was quiet. When he spoke again, his voice had changed, got all flat and cool, like it did when he was about to present data in a lab.
“I edited. We edited.”
My stomach dropped. “What does that mean?”
“I recorded our conversation. I always recorded anything that might be… complicated later. He didn’t know. He was frustrated and angry. Hedidsay he had plans. Hedidsay he wasn’t going to let ‘some rich man’ buy him off.” He sighed, a tired sound. “Your mother and I took pieces. We spliced them. We had access to other clips. We put together something that made the point we needed it to make,” he admitted.
“The pointyouneeded,” I repeated. My voice did not sound like mine.
“Sweetheart, you were nineteen and brilliant with ababy. We didn’t send you to Emancipation for that, but we could tell it was coming when we visited for Thanksgiving. Hadn’t seen us in months but could barely make time for us, trying to run out and be with that boy. There you were a year later—you couldn’t even attend your first semester of college. A mind like that, possibly going to waste. You were alone in Houston. You had a baby and a broken heart and more pressure than any girl that age should have. We saw you drowning. We saw how you looked when his name came up. You were ready to run right back into something we believed would break you.”
“So, you broke me first,” I said.
He exhaled audibly. “We protected you. We protected your future. Youhaveto understand; we grew up with boys like him. Talented. Charming. Dangerous. They pull girls in, and those girls never get out. We werenotgoing to lose you to that.”
“Y’all didn’t even know him, Daddy.”
There was a rustle and I realized my mother must have taken the phone.
“Kyleigh. Baby, listen to me.”
“I’m listening,” I said.
“We did what we thought was best. We watched your grandmother’s heart almost give out when you told her you were pregnant. We watched you bleeding in that hospital bed. We watched you cry every night the first year back in Houston. Your father would come home from work and find you on the floor with that baby sleeping on your chest and your eyes swollen.” She took a breath, blew it out. “We decided that if he really loved you, he would fight through anything. We decided if a little manipulation was all it took to keep him away, then he didn’t deserve you in the first place.”
My chest felt tight, like somebody had pulled a belt around it.
“So, when I said I wanted to tell him, you went to him first. You made sure he stayed away. Then you came back and made sure I stayed away.”
“You are our daughter. That’s why we did it. We wanted you to finish school. We wanted you to have options that didn’t involve waiting on a man to choose you,” Mama coaxed.
“Did you ever consider what I wanted? Did you ever consider Aziza, the little girl who spent nine years without her father because two scientists decided to run a social experiment on their only child?”
My father spoke up then. “Of course, we did! We poured everything into her. We gave her the best schools, the best doctors, the best?—”
“We gave her everything but him,” I screamed.
Silence sat heavy between us. On my side of the line, the house was quiet, on theirs, I could hear the muffled sound of a TV in the background.
“So that recording. The one you played me. That was fake?” My voice was calmer.
“Not fake,” my father objected. “Edited. Reconstructed.”
I laughed. It was dry, humorless. “You lied to me. To him. On purpose. For years.”
“Yes,” my mother said. There was no way to dress it up anymore. “Yes, we did.”
