“Oh my God. Did they arrest her too?” Meagan was instantly thrown out of her rumination by the word fight. Looking at the scratches that covered her cellmate’s face caused her to jump. The skin from her hairline to her chin on the left side of her face was scratched up. “It’s clear she hit you.”
Her cellmate shook her head and said, “In a perfect world with a fair system, she’d be sitting somewhere in the building with us, but this shit is too fucked up for that to be facts. Her ass probably at home, wondering why I haven’t called her yet.”
“What?”
“You know, she’s one of those insecure types. If I’m not with her, I’m somewhere fucking off on her.”
“You must have got caught cheating before.”
“Once. I got caught cheating once, and she has held it over my head for two damn years.”
“And you think she’s wrong for that?” Meagan’s guilt had surfaced.
“Hell yeah, if she decided to stay in the relationship with me. If you’re unhappy in the relationship you’re in and you decide to stay or do nothing about it, who can you be mad at but yourself? Deciding to stay means deciding to forgive, and if you thought you could and can’t, then you don’t owe your time to explaining shit to nobody. If my girl couldn’t handle what I did, she should have left.”
“I hope you don’t think it’s always that easy to pack up and leave. I was in a relationship where he beat me if I thought about it.”
“Did you have a job?”
“Yes, of course,” Meagan answered.
“Did he work with you?”
“No, he was living his own dreams.”
“So he didn’t work with you, and you decided to come home every night out of fear, right?”
Nervously, she answered, “Yes.”
“Then that was a choice that you made. You had eight hours to run, hide, and get away. An eight-hour flight from Georgia would land you somewhere in or near Germany,” she said with a laugh. “I’m not saying it’s easy to leave. I know there are different levels to this shit, but guess what? If we let someone else dictate our lives, we have to deal with whatever comes from us giving them consent to.”
Meagan didn’t want to hear her, but she heard her loud and clear. There wasn’t any finger pointing she could do for what she had allowed to happen. Going to jail wasn’t a punishment; it was a reality check. And she’d never forget the reality she’d find in it.
* * *
Angelo never received the property and money his mother blackmailed William for, because everything was in his aunt’s name, and he couldn’t provide any proof that they belonged to him or William. Clara had trusted her sister to do the right thing, but it was too much money for her sister to give up willingly, and there was no one that could force her to do so. However, Angelo still came out on top. He inherited his father’s four-bedroom house, which used to belong to his grandparents, the church, and the mortuary. He moved his new makeshift family into the house and sold everything else. Between him and Meagan, they had enough money to never work another day in their lives, and if Denali chose not to work, he wouldn’t have to, either.
Angelo watched now as Meagan played with her son in the living room. He wished the DNA results named him as the child’s father, but upon reading the letter he had received in the mail moments earlier, he learned that he wasn’t.
“Did they give him the death penalty?” Angelo asked, praying the answer would be yes.
“They haven’t announced it yet, but does it really matter? He’ll die in prison either way.”
“How do you feel about it?”
“You know how I feel about it, Angelo. He’s a cold-blooded killer, so whatever comes his way is well deserved. Can you grab Denali for me so I can go check the mail?”
Angelo had the paternity letter she had been waiting on in his back pocket. He didn’t plan to give it to her until the sentencing was done, but if Devin’s sentence really didn’t matter to her, he’d give it to her now.
“I think this is what you’re looking for. Here.”
She ripped open the letter and scanned through the lines like a professional speed reader. When she was done, she balled the letter up and kissed Denali, with tears building in her eyes.
“So . . . is he William’s or Devin’s?” Angelo asked. “I got my letter saying little man isn’t mine on paper, but he’s mine, anyway.”
“Then it doesn’t matter whose blood he has.” She shrugged. “What do my men want to eat for dinner?” Meagan asked, changing the subject, but Angelo still wanted to know.
“You’re right, baby. It doesn’t matter, but I’d still like to know.”
Meagan handed the letter to Angelo and began busying herself in the kitchen, with the child on her hip. He flew his eyes past the DNA analysis results to the part that mattered to him the most.
“The above alleged fathers, William Tolliver, Angelo Hurley II, and Devin Montgomery, are excluded as the biological fathers of the tested child. Based on the testing results obtained from analysis of the DNA loci listed, the probability of paternity is 00.9996 percent,” he read out loud. “Wait, so who is little man’s daddy?”
“You are. We’ve already established that.”
“Yes, we have, but you said it could be only one of the three of us. Unless you got pregnant by Jesus, yo’ ass lied. Who else were you fucking?” he snapped.
Meagan had had a feeling the test results would reveal a side of Angelo she had yet to see. He’d played cool about the paternity thus far, but that was because there was a possibility he could be named as the father. She knew he’d heat up if he wasn’t.
“You want a list of who I was fucking so you can count who’s been in my pussy or a list of his possible fathers?” she countered, rolling her eyes.
“Damn. There’s a difference? How many different lists do you have for your pussy?”
Angelo wasn’t trying to start an argument, because there was only one person he prayed wasn’t the father, and that was William. If the courts named William as the father, it would make it hard for the couple to forget their past each day they spent raising the child. In a fucked way, William had a father role over both of their lives. He was technically Angelo’s stepfather and Meagan’s godfather, although he didn’t perform the duties of either title correctly for different reasons.
Angelo prayed that if he wasn’t the father, Devin was. He had always liked the young man, and the fact that he had killed William made him all right in Devin’s book. He hated what Meagan had caused him to turn into for her love. His career and his freedom were gone, and possibly his life, because he had fallen in love with the wrong bitch. That had always been a fear of Angelo’s and the sole reason he hadn’t dated. He had watched his father go through the same thing over his mother and had never liked the taste it left in his mouth. On the bright side, with Devin spending the rest of his life in prison or possibly being put to death, Angelo could adopt Denali and raise him to be the man he wanted him to be.
“I thought you said we weren’t going to spend our lives consumed with who Denali’s dad is?” she asked as she walked over to him and placed both of his hands on her stomach. “You said he was your blood no matter what, just like our baby growing in my stomach. Did you change your mind?”
Angelo kissed her stomach and then placed his ear on it. He didn’t say anything until he heard his baby move around in its temporary home.
“No, I didn’t change my mind. I just want to know. We will never have this conversation again.”
“I know we won’t, because you are the only father he will ever know, but if you mean by blood, I’m guessing it’s one of those other two youngsters I was messing with that you cut off. My guess would be the delivery driver, because he had a lot of kids, and there were times we got caught up in the moment and protection wasn’t used.”
“And you’re good without ever knowing? You know you’re doing him like your mother did you when it came to your father.”
/> She shrugged nonchalantly, and Angelo decided he should leave well enough alone. There wasn’t any reason to go flipping over mattresses to find the man Denali shared DNA with, because Meagan was right. Angelo was his father, and that was that. He wouldn’t allow another test to be done on the child to prove to anyone what he already knew to be facts. At first, he had felt like every man was owed the right to know if he had introduced a child into this world, but when Meagan pushed one last time in the delivery room, he became the only father that mattered.
What if they did track down the biological father and he rejected Denali? he thought. After his experiences with his own mother, Angelo vowed that his son would never experience the same pain of rejection, and he would spend the rest of his life ensuring that.
The End
Disrespectfully Yours Page 22