just made me hustle that much harder. Then I got busted and they took the scholarship away when I got convicted. But that’s my fault. And you had a scholarship to Clark Atlanta. You turned that down to raise Kylie in Kansas City. I could be to blame for you only being able to get your associate’s from that online course. Who knows how far you would’ve went if you had gone to Atlanta. To be honest, I started trying to get you pregnant when I found out you got yo scholarship. I figured you was about to do big things and I wanted to keep you, get you pregnant before one of them niggas down there did. So I’m sorry for doing
“Thank you for saying that.”
“I didn’t cheat because I resented you. I cheated because I was stupid. When I got out of prison the first time, I felt like I owed every female that sent me a letter. Fuckin’ all of ‘em was my way of saying thank you. You know how appreciative I am, Tyesha. But that was a twisted, selfish way of thinking. I’ve since learned from my mistakes. That’s why I stopped that cheating shit.”
“You stopped? When?”
One of the guards walked up and told me to keep my hands visible on the table. He also made Rodrick tuck in his prison red shirt and hand over the rubberband holding up his dreads. Rubberbands weren’t allowed.
“I been done stopped,” Rodrick told me when the guard walked off. “And not just since I got locked up again.”
“You’ll never change, Rodrick. I’ve learned that some people never will. You can’t force people to change; the only person you can change is yourself. The only reason I came up here was so you could see your daughter. And to tell you that I’m moving on.”
“Hold up, Tyesha. I just told you that I stopped cheating.”
“That’s funny. Because the one bitch I just knew you would never talk to again, Dava Babcock, just posted a picture of a letter you sent her two days ago. And before you fix your face to tell a lie, let me ad lib what the letter said. ‘
He leaned back in his seat and sighed.
We really didn’t have much to talk about for the rest of the visit. He asked to take a picture with Kylie and I didn’t mind. I paid for three images and stood behind the photographer as they posed together.
“When’s the next time you coming up?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’ll try to bring Kylie at least once a month.”
When I got back to my car, I buckled Kylie in her booster seat. I got in behind the wheel and checked the comments from The Site on my phone. Earlier I had uploaded pictures of me and Kylie and Landon—and his two little girls, Kendal and Kayla—posing in front of Kaleidoscope’s glass doors at Crown Center. Landon made a comment that he was glad he didn’t get arrested this time. I laughed and clicked Like.
The private message box in the corner of my display screen was lit.
I tapped it with my thumb and read the message that appeared.
Rick Myers: I’ll be waiting patiently until the next time I can see you again.
The message was sent to me thirty minutes ago from Cameron, Missouri. I knew Gideon Byers was locked up for 25 years in a maximum security prison in that town. “Rick Myers” was his fake Site name, which he’d been using all this time to stalk and spy on me. If he sent this message, it meant that he’d smuggled a cell phone into the institution somehow.
My first thought was to go to my settings and block him from viewing my page. But then I decided to let him keep watching. I knew one day I’d find a good man and start a family, and I wanted Gideon to see every step, to suffer every time I posted how happy I was, to get angry when I uploaded my wedding photos, to cry when he saw our child’s beautiful face.
For him—but more importantly for myself—I was determined to live a blessed life. And to move forward, first I had to swallow my pride and take a step back.
-
Tyesha816 went from in a relationship to single.
Also by Felony Books
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The following is an excerpt from:
STATUS 2
CHAPTER 1
It took two hours for me and my daughter to get here. Normally, she wouldn’t even be able to sit still for twenty minutes, but I kept her occupied with a new Disney movie on my smartphone.
We pulled into the prison parking lot, tires crunching over patches of snow. Rodrick told me ahead of time not to park in the same spot as usual, and I didn’t. I drove straight to the end of the lot where the big gate was. There were other people standing outside their cars in big coats and skull caps, waiting on their loved ones to be released. Me and Kylie parked and joined them.
