What's Done In the Dark by Reshonda Tate Billingsley Read Free Book Online Page A

all-around good guy. I made a mental note to get the real deal from her, but in the meantime, I was going to hit him up for all the information I could get.
    “So, are you and Felise really just friends?”
    He hesitated, long enough that I didn’t know what to make of it, but then he said, “Yeah, we really are. I guess I took your best friend slot. Besides, she has her man now.”
    “You talking about Greg?”
    “Yeah, she loves her some Greg.”
    He had a look cross his face that I couldn’t make out, which led me to ask him, “Are you sure?”
    “Oh, yeah. What did Felise tell you?”
    “She told me that you guys were just friends. That you were like a brother to her.”
    He forced a smile. “See. A brother.”
    “So, that means you’re on the market?”
    He shrugged. “I’m not trying to get in a serious relationship right now. I want to focus on law school. But I wouldn’t mind having a good friend to hang out with and whip up my meals for.”
    I leaned back and nibbled on a raspberry soufflé he’d cooked for dessert. “I wouldn’t mind being that friend.”
    Before long our friendship escalated into something more, and before I knew it, we were sleeping together on a regular basis.
    When I got pregnant with Tahiry, just two months after we started sleeping together, we decided to do what was right—and that had been the story of my life ever since.
    I SHOOK AWAY THE MEMORY. I needed to focus on the positive and stop thinking about what-ifs and what could’ve been. This was the life God had given me. It was time that I learned to appreciate it.
    I lay back on the couch as I made all kinds of mental promises of how things were going to change as soon as Steven got home. I could be happy as a wife and a mother if I took my mother’s advice and found something outside my home that gave me purpose. Yeah, I thought. I had a good life. And getting an outside life wasall I needed to get myself back on track.

9
    Felise
    I DON’T KNOW HOW I got down the hallway, down the elevator, and out of the hotel to my sister’s apartment, but here I was, in her living room, trying desperately to pull myself together. I was pacing back and forth across her Berber carpet. The tears hadn’t stopped coming.
    “Okay, would you relax?” Fran said.
    “That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one that committed a crime,” I said frantically. I was so not a criminal. I’d forgotten to pay for a bracelet when I was fifteen, and I had an anxiety attack until I got my mom to take me back to the store to pay for it. How in the world did I think I’d be able to live with leaving a dead man without reporting it? “I’m such a lowlife,” I moaned.
    “Oh, stop being dramatic,” Fran said. “What crime did you commit? I don’t think having a lethal kitty is against the law.”
    I stopped and stared at her. That was not what happened between Steven and me. “This isn’t the time for jokes.”
    “Okay, okay,” Fran said, raising her hands apologetically. “Sorry.”
    I fell down onto her sofa. “I just can’t believe this.”
    Fran shook her head. “Me either. Because I can’t understand how Dolly Do-Right,” she said, using the nickname she had given me after the bracelet incident, “would do something so scandalous.”
    That had always been a source of contention between Fran and me. I was the perfect one. The one who always did what she was supposed to, and was always where she was supposed to be. Even our older sister, the ultra-religious Mavis, got in more trouble than I did. But Fran was the wild one, and our parents—God rest their souls—never let us forget who they preferred: me.
    “I can’t believe I did it either.” I sighed. “I was just so mad at Greg for forgetting our anniversary, and I was so sick and tired of being neglected, and then I bumped into Steven at the bar, and he was mad at Paula, and we both had been drinking and . . . and . . .” I buried my face in my hands.