“Have you seen the life insurance policy?” she asked.

Nannie looked at her, sympathetically. “It’s in your hand,” she replied.

Alani looked down, as if someone else gripped the folder. “I’m losing it,” she whispered.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You want me to come with you to the funeral parlor?”

Alani shook her head. “No, I have to do this myself,” Alani said, shaking her head. Seeing her daughter’s body under the white sheet at the morgue had been the hardest thing she had ever done. It was an image she would never forget. She was a mother burying her child. Nothing about that was right and she didn’t need anyone witnessing her breakdowns. She was trying her hardest to keep her composure, to only fall to her knees behind the safety of closed doors, and to stifle her wails at night, face in pillow. She just couldn’t let anyone see the type of grief she was going through, because it was teetering on the edge of crazy.

She rushed out and jumped into her raggedy Pontiac G6. The car was so old they didn’t even make the model anymore. The reason she had even left her daughter in Lucas’ care was so that she could pick up overtime hours to be able to save up for the down payment on a pretty, little Jeep she had been dreaming about. It all seemed so selfish now, so pointless. She was worried about people in her city judging her, laughing at her for driving a bucket car, and had lost time with her little girl, chasing material things. She had left Kenzie with Lucas plenty of times before, always so she could work, but she now questioned if she was working to take care of her daughter or if the motive had truly been superficial. She had never thought it would result in such a tragedy. “I’m to blame for all this,” she thought. “I should have moved Lucas out of Flint way before the streets got ahold of him; and I should have never left Kenzie with him. What was I thinking?”

Alani had tried hard to never judge her brother, but not once had she taken a dime of his ill-gotten money. She had watched him slink lower and lower into the bowels of the city’s underworld. I should have done more to stop it. Look what has happened because I sat around and did nothing at all, she thought.