His Queen of Chaos
"You've been gone nine years, Mama. You couldn't come to the funeral. You couldn't send a card. How do you know how my father died? How do you know one single thing about Malik St. James?"
And there, right there, I saw it.
The smallest hitch. A half-second where her rehearsed grief bumped into a question it hadn't prepared for, and Tasha's eyes flicked down and to the left before she answered, the exact tell I'd learned to read in first-year trial advocacy, the classic construction glance, the thing a witness does when she's reaching for an answer instead of remembering one.
"I still have people," Tasha said. "From the old life. People who talk to me. People who felt sorry for me, watching m