Page 69 of The Princess and the P.I.

Fiona walked down into the basement of Maurice’s condo with a heavy sense of dread.

Fiona knew they had to sit down and have a talk about what they were going to do as a family.

But the time never came. In truth, she was a little afraid to broach the subject.

But they needed to figure it out, before anyone else decided it for them.

“Your sisters-in-law came by this morning,” Esi said.

“Esi! Why didn’t you tell me?! What did they need?” She didn’t understand the flood of panic in her chest.

“They brought us food. Nigerian jollof rice and dry chicken.”

Fiona rolled her shoulders. “Esi, can I remind you that there are men out there in unmarked cars? That our home is currently cracked open? Imagine if we would have been there. When we are safe, you will be free to go get Ghanaian jollof. Until then, we are grateful for what we’re given.”

“I tried, Fiona. I was very nice, but those women are exactly what people say they are. Mean, closed off. I made a little joke about you and Maurice, looking for a little older sister eye-rolling. Rapport. Commiseration.” She cycled her hands between them. “And…they just shut down.”

“Esi…what did you say?”

“Don’t worry, I didn’t ruin your chances with those witches. They dropped you off a dress. A Valentino.” She let the word hang in the air. “I guess his sisters have decided for him. They’re grooming you. All of your clothes are different. You act differently now. They want you to be a Bennett.”

Fiona didn’t understand why it was so impossible to imagine that Maurice had chosen her. What was so unlovable about her to Esi?

Fiona studied her sister’s face, noticing the tightness around her eyes, the way her lips pressed together after each harsh word.

Esi, the one who had always seemed so lucky, so smart and beautiful, was sitting across from her, seething with something that looked a lot like jealousy.

This was not an unfamiliar emotion. Fiona had felt some semblance of jealousy, envy, awe, and pride toward her perfect sister all of her life.

“You like Maurice,” Fiona said, leaning back in her chair.

Esi recoiled. “Skinny man who shakes with his left hand and watches cartoons?” Esi sucked her teeth.

“No. Not the man . But the idea. I guess. I wrote to him years back. Did he tell you? I spilled church secrets just like you. I thought he would rescue me from my marriage, from my life. Just. Like. You. But he was incapable of rising to the moment then. I guess I didn’t have the right cup size?

I don’t fucking know. Fiona, I tried so hard.

For what?” Her voice betrayed more than annoyance.

“There’s just no way to get life right ,” Esi said, shaking now, her hands twitching at her sides like they didn’t know what to do.

“Kwesi was perfect, Fiona. Perfect. And he’s gone .

I listened to all these men, married early, became a doctor—did everything the way I was supposed to.

And now I might have to close my practice.

Meanwhile, you—you never even tried .” She laughed bitterly, a sound that was more like choking.

“You just pushed the wrong button on a vest, and suddenly the golden boy in the wealthiest family on the East Coast would take a bullet for you.”

Esi stood up, lips dry and cracking, eyes bloodshot.

“You’re sitting here, looking like you stole Kelly Rowland’s skin-care routine, just waiting for your man to get back and your soft life to resume, for fuck’s sake!

Why? My brother did everything right! I did everything right!

But you get—” She stopped, rage radiating off her like heat.

She didn’t know what exactly to point at. “A fucking Valentino.”

Fiona blinked. “A dress?” she asked softly, though she knew this wasn’t about a dress.

This was rage . Pure and raw, the first real emotion Esi had let herself feel in months, Fiona guessed, maybe years.

She recognized it because she’d been there too.

Rage was where it started. The first rung on a ladder she hadn’t even realized she was climbing until it had taken her right up in front of that stage to push that button.

Fiona watched her sister, but she said nothing, not yet. Truthfully, there was no calming this storm, no pulling Esi from its grip. Esi would have to climb that ladder herself.

“I didn’t mean to scream.” Esi sighed, frustrated. “I honestly don’t know where that came from. I just feel angry in every damned direction.”

“Can I say something?” Fiona began. Her sister turned to her, always skeptical, but Fiona pressed on.

“The thing that’s disrupted right now—what’s eating at you—it’s your sense of justice.

And that’s real. It’s not something you can shake off, like a bad dream.

It will keep you up at night, hollow you out, make you sick if you don’t find a way to deal with it. ”

Esi rolled her eyes. “Okay, you get your cheeks clapped and now you’re that blind chick from The Matrix ?”

“I don’t have any answers,” Fiona admitted, leaning forward, her hands twisting in her lap.

“I wish I was that lady. But something that’s helped me, at least a little, is this.

” She paused, searching for the right way to shape it.

“So those scales of justice. The ones that feel so broken right now? Instead of trying to balance them by tearing something down, I try to stack gold bars on the other side. One small, solid thing at a time.”

Esi unfolded her arms and leaned forward. Fiona pressed on.

“If you can channel that fury for what happened to Kwesi, to Dad, to you into something that builds instead of burns,” she said, her words gaining momentum now, “I’m not asking you to forget, or forgive, or even root for Maurice and me.

Just try to find a way to live with what happened to Kwe—to make something out of it.

Or not let it take more from you than it already has. ”

Esi didn’t reply, not immediately. She just sighed and grabbed a stack of papers and wordlessly slapped them down in front of her. She wanted, at least for now, to help.

“Next you’re going to be bending spoons.”

—

Fiona cracked her knuckles, flexed her fingers, and settled in. This was her domain. Not the yacht, not the courtroom, not even Maurice’s plush velvet couch. Here, in the deep and winding threads of Reddit, she was untouchable.

She didn’t start with a dramatic post. No crying for help.

No grand exposé. That wasn’t how this worked.

The key was subtlety, making people feel like they had put the pieces together, not that they had been led by the nose.

So she started small, hyperlocal. A throwaway comment under a thread about religious trauma.

A carefully worded question in a parenting forum, masked as curiosity.

A seemingly innocent post about the role of obedience in faith-based marriages. The bait was set.

At first, the responses trickled in. Standard, vague anecdotes.

@FaithfulWarrior21: Oh, yeah, my church used to make us fast as punishment.

@Proverbs31OrBust: I had to write Bible verses over and over for talking back.

Normal, tame stuff. But Fiona knew how to guide a conversation, how to make people feel safe enough to say the thing they’d been holding back. She followed up strategically—never too pushy, always just curious enough.

Then it happened. A user, SisterActUP, dropped a tiny bomb.

@SisterActUP: I don’t know if this is the place, but I think about this all the time.

There was a correction program at my church.

It was supposed to help women “submit to God.” But it wasn’t prayer circles or Bible study.

It was crazy stuff, like isolation. Cold rooms. Days of fasting. And corporal punishment.

Fiona’s breath hitched.

She replied carefully, delicately, like she wasn’t vibrating out of her seat.

@NewPath74: I’ve heard of things like that before. Do you think other people ever told?

The response was almost instant.

@SisterActUP: I know a woman who got close.

@NewPath74: Wow. Did she have a change of heart?

@SisterActUP: Uh…no. They busted up her house and then…I just stopped seeing her. They told us she left.

That was all Fiona needed. The choir had begun. One voice became three.

RE @SisterActUP:

@NoMoreNunsense: She didn’t leave!

@DevoutlyYours: I think I know that church.

@Anonymous83: No way. Did they, like, spray-paint stuff??

Three became twelve. Women from different cities, different states, slowly coming together. Names of deacons, of leaders, of men, floated to the surface like oil in water.

And then, buried deep in a late-night reply, in a thread most would scroll past:

@QuietStorm: Brother David was in charge of some of the worst of it.

Fiona’s stomach flipped. She tapped the screen, rereading it, making sure her brain wasn’t twisting the words.

David.

She exhaled through her nose. That’s it. That’s the crack. Fiona sat back, letting her fingers hover over the keyboard. She let the information sit there, let it breathe, let it become real. David was going to go down.

A creak from down the hall made her glance up.

Her father’s door opened, and he looked smaller somehow.

His movements so slow and careful. He’d been fasting for days.

That was his way of making sense of things.

Of cleansing. But for the first time in weeks, there was something steady in his gaze, something supernaturally… present.

“Dad, you want some water?” Fiona asked, already half-rising.

“No,” he said, voice hoarse but certain. “I want to look at some evidence with you.”

Fiona froze. Her heart knocked against her ribs. This was the man who had once refused to even entertain the idea that his church, his community, could be anything but righteous. And now he was here, asking to help.

She swallowed past the lump in her throat, smiling a little, watery but real.

“You want to help?”