Page 24 of Cannon

But I wasn’t going.

I had no intention of touching Carmen or stepping foot in that hotel.

I just wanted her to feel stupid. Maybe come to her senses and start treating her man right. I wasn’t thinking about pussy.

Because I had work to do.

Moves to make.

People to find.

And money to track down.

Chapter 9

Queen

After meeting with Cannon, I got back to work. I also made several calls to check on my daughter. I was at my wit’s end with what to do next. Now that she’d been kicked out of school, she’d have to move back in with me.

And the truth was, I didn’t want to live with her anymore.

I’d had my fill of sharing space with unstable people.

My whole life had been shaped by it. My mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and histrionic personality disorder, which meant every day was a new performance. One minute, she was charismatic and charming, lighting up the room like a one-woman stage show. The next, she was spiraling into chaos, screaming at shadows and accusing me of betrayal because I didn’t pour her wine fast enough. And to make matters worse, she was a scammer and forced me in on her scams.

It wasn’t just mood swings. It was emotional warfare. And I learned early on how to read her energy like weather patterns, predicting the storms, bracing for impact, pretending I was safe when I wasn’t.

Now here I was, staring down the barrel of déjà vu.

ZaZa was different, but the symptoms rhymed. The rage. The delusions. The mess she left in her wake, expecting me to clean it up while pretending I didn’t resent her for it.

And I did resent her.

Not because she was sick, but because I was tired.

Tired of tiptoeing. Tired of fixing. Tired of loving people who couldn’t love me back in the ways I needed.

And that made me feel like shit.

What kind of mother doesn’t want her child to come home?

But I wasn’t just her mother. I was also a woman trying to hold her own life together.

And I was cracking.

Being around ZaZa always brought my mother back to me.

Especially that night.

We were dressed to the nines. Me in a little navy dress with white tights and patent leather shoes that pinched my pinky toes, and Mama in a gold wrap dress that shimmered under streetlights, her lips painted blood red and her curls pinned up like she was headed to the Oscars. She looked like money, even though we barely had enough to fill the tank.

“This is your night, baby,” she said, spritzing perfume behind her ears as we sat in the car. “You’re a queen. And queens eat lobster for their birthdays.”

I grinned wide, excited, believing her. It was my tenth birthday and I was having lobster for the first time ever.

We pulled up to the Red Lobster, and she smacked her lips like we were arriving at a five-star French bistro.

“Come on,” she said, stepping out of the car in stilettos. Her dress shimmered under the parking lot lights, and she held her chin high like royalty.