Nighttime was torture for Alani. It used to be the hours of the day that she looked forward to the most. She could come home after a long day of work and retreat to her dreams. Since the murders, she hadn’t slept; each time she closed her eyes, all she saw was blood. So, instead, she wrote in her journal for hours, trying to release some of the angst that gripped her heart. There was a tenderness inside her chest, now. She had felt it at work the night her daughter and brother had been murdered. It hit her out of nowhere and had been ever present since. Beneath the excruciating loss was a dull ache that she was sure would remain with her for the rest of her life. It made her feel like every room she walked into was too small. It sucked the air from her lungs and the strength from her legs. While losing her brother hurt, losing her daughter was devastating. Her brother was a loss, her daughter was a piece of her flesh cut away from the bone… without anesthesia. It was her oxygen reduced for the rest of her life. So, instead of breathing, she was sipping air through a straw, existing minimally with what was left after grief chewed her up and spit her out. Alani had never felt so alone. The darkness of night was personified into a monster that she couldn’t slay. She was terrified of the nightmares that awaited her when she slept; therefore, coffee and her journal made for great company. The hours ticked by, slowly, each minute seeming to last longer than the one before it. There was so much on her shoulders that she felt like she would collapse, and she knew that there was only more stress to come. She still had to deliver the news to her daughter’s father and she dreaded it. They weren’t on speaking terms. In fact, she hadn’t spoken to him in six months, after she found out he had another girl visiting him in prison. Yes, she was that girl…the one who had fallen in love with Cream Richardson, a bad boy with a long reputation and even longer dick. The first time she took it for a ride, he had her hooked. That was a decade ago and she had stuck with him for years. She had poured her all into him, dropping out of college to cook up the ounces of cocaine he moved weekly, and lay under him all day. She cooked his meals, washed his clothes, sucked him dry, day in and day out. It was the type of relationship that kept young girls satisfied; but at the time, she was fresh, and he had her nose wide open. The thug in him was just enough to keep her excited and satisfied. He was five years her senior and old enough to make her young mind swoon. She became, exactly, what he wanted her to be, stifling her dreams of college to make sure they stayed close. He disguised her captivity under the notion of loyalty and she was a willing participant, but it ended the way all hood loves end. He betrayed her. When Alani found out she was pregnant, the idea of a baby complicated things. Motherhood transformed her into the nagging baby mama who demanded things, who needed things, who accepted less of his bullshit. With a newborn baby on her hip, Alani became less fun, less impulsive, less reckless. She couldn’t be young and carefree because becoming a mother was like taking an aging pill and she immediately grew up. She wanted stability and a real family for their daughter. When she began to put expectations of maturation on Cream, the cheating began. She ignored it for years, but when he got locked up for carrying a concealed weapon, it became harder for him to balance his plethora of women. Stupid-ass had me driving hours every other week to make sure I saw his face, only to find out I was one of many chicks in his rotation, she thought. She was angry at him; not only for his disloyalty, but for his absence in its totality. How she had ended up simply wasn’t how things were supposed to be. She couldn’t help but think if he had never gotten arrested, their daughter may still be alive. Maybe he could have stopped Lucas from getting so heavily involved in the streets, or he could have protected their home from the masked man who entered it and changed her life forever. She knew it was unfair to blame Cream for things that were out of his control, but somehow, she had been left to handle it all. They hadn’t spoken in over six months. After a random girl popped up to her home, carrying a baby she claimed Cream had fathered, Alani was done. She had stopped forcing her raggedy car up the highway to visit him, she had stopped answering his calls, she had stopped writing him letters. After years of holding onto him, of fighting off chicks around the way, of being known as his girl in their neighborhood - which wasn’t a good thing anyway because the same way she was known as his girl, he was known to be a cheat. After all that, she simply let go. When he called, she gave the phone directly to Kenzie. He would be calling tomorrow and she would have no choice but to speak to him, because he would never hear Kenzie’s voice again. The anxiety built in her chest, as she realized she would have to be the one to tell him. No matter how much disdain she had in her heart for him, she never wanted to put this type of pain on him. She had loved him, once upon a time; and despite his doggish ways, she was sure he loved her. She was going to break his heart when he realized that his flesh and blood was no more. When he realized that the connection they shared had been stripped and now they were just two people who knew one another - once upon a time. This news would break him. She knew this to be true because it had decimated her. It had torn down every fiber of the woman she had built over the years. Scraped away faith she had adopted on her journey to this day. The death of her daughter had changed her relationship with God, and she was sure it would bring out the devil in Cream.