POV: Celeste
Jada is already through the door before I finish unlocking it, and the look on her face tells me she has been rehearsing calm the whole drive over, which means she is not calm at all.
"Talk," she says.
I want to. I have been alone with all of it for three hours and the weight of that is sitting somewhere between my shoulders and my throat and it has not moved. But now that she is here, standing in front of me with that paper bag and that careful face, I do not know where to start, so I start in the wrong place.
"There was an inspector this morning."
She puts the bag on the counter. She does not sit. She watches me the way she does when she knows the thing I am saying is not the thing I mean.
I tell her about the violation. The forty thousand. The thirty days. She listens without touching her phone, without moving much, just tracking me with her eyes while I talk. She opens a bottle of water and puts it near my hand and does not comment on the fact that I do not open it.
Then I tell her about the email.
She sits down. "Same morning as the inspector?"
"Same morning."
"That is not bad luck, Celeste."
"I know."
She is quiet for a second, which with Jada is never actually quiet. It is just her thinking loud without using her mouth. I turn the water bottle in my hands. I look at the counter. I am aware that I am stalling and I am doing it anyway because once I say the next part it becomes a conversation and right now it is still just a fact I am carrying by myself.
She says: "What else."
Not a question. She always knows.
I put the water bottle down. I say: "I took a test this morning. Before the inspector."
The shop goes still.
Jada does not gasp. She does not move fast or talk fast or do any of the things that would make me feel like the situation is bigger than I can hold. She just says: "And?"
"Two lines."
She reaches across and puts her hand over mine. She does not say anything. Just sits with me in it, and that is the only thing I needed and the only thing I could never have asked for out loud.
I look at my father's photo on the back wall. I do not look at Jada's face because right now her face has too much in it and I cannot afford that.
"How far along?" she asks.
"I do not know. I have not called anyone."
"Okay. One thing at a time." She squeezes my hand once, opens the bag, puts food in front of me. I look at it without seeing it. She says eat. I eat, because that is how it works between us. She does not ask. She just makes it the obvious next thing.
We sit. The shop is quiet. Outside a truck passes and the front window rattles like it always does, and I think about a man standing in front of that window this morning, tilting his head at it, looking at it too long for someone who was just passing through.
I push that away.
Jada says: "You know what I have to ask."
I know.
"Who is the father?"
Three weeks I have been not-answering that question inside my own head. Three weeks of going around it, over it, through everything else so I did not have to stand still in front of it. Jada just said it out loud and now there is nowhere else to go.
I close the food container. I look at the front door.
I say his name.
It comes out smaller than I meant it to. My voice does not hold the way I needed it to, breaks just slightly at the end, and I hate that. I hate that his name still does something to my voice.
Jada goes completely still.
She knows the name. Everyone in Chicago who pays any attention to money or sport or power knows that name. I watched it happen on her face, the recognition, and then the thing after recognition, which is worse.
"Celeste."
"I know."
"He is the one buying this block."
"I know."
She opens her mouth. Closes it. I can see her working through what to say versus what she actually wants to say, and those are two very different things with Jada and I am grateful she is choosing carefully.
Her phone lights up on the counter between us.
She looks down at it. Her face changes in a way I do not like.
She turns it toward me without saying anything.
A news alert. Steele Development acquires south block. Demolition scheduled in sixty days.
I read it twice. Sixty days, not thirty. The city gave me thirty for the fees. He has filed for sixty. Two clocks running at the same time, and both of them end at the same address.
Jada takes the phone back slowly. "Did he come here today? In person?"
I look at her.
"Celeste. Did he come to the shop?"
"Yes."
She puts the phone face down. She does all that very deliberately, like she is keeping her hands busy so the rest of her does not do something else.
"What did he say?"
"He said he knows my brother."
The words land in the room between us and I watch Jada's face go through three different things in about two seconds. Surprise. Then something sharper. Then very careful stillness.
"What do you mean he knows Damon?"
"He said they played together. Eight years ago."
She is looking at me the way she looks when she has already connected something I have not caught up to yet.
"Jada."
She picks up her phone. Not to show me anything. She is typing.
"What are you doing?"
She turns the screen toward me.
It is a search result. An old sports article, eight years back, with a photo. Two players. One of them is younger and the stance is different but the face is the same face that was standing in my shop this morning.
The other one is my brother.
The headline reads: Wade career ended after teammate incident. Steele cleared.