“Is she pregnant, Dru?” I asked, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to breathe if she didn’t answer my question — one way or the other.

When Dru shook her head and said, “No,” all kinds of relief swept over me.

Tears of joy seeped from my eyes. “Thank you, Father,” I shouted, but when I reached over to hug Dru, her expression did not match the celebration I wanted to have in this car. “What?”

“She’s not pregnant because she already had the baby. Her baby’s nine months old.”

My victory had been right there in my hands and Drew had just snatched it away. Now, I cried for a different reason.

She said, “That’s what I didn’t want to tell you over the phone. Sharonne has a baby. A boy.”

“Oh, my God.” I dropped my head onto the steering wheel. “Is it Jeremy’s?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know, but let me tell you she sure knows a lot about the two of you.”

“Oh, my God.”

“That’s why I didn’t want to talk to you while I was down there. I hooked up with Sharonne pretty quickly. Folks who don’t go far from home still hang out in the same places with the same people. So she and I ran into each other by,” Dru put her hands and made air quotes, “accident on Thursday when I went to the mall.”

“Do I want to hear this story?”

She was washed in sadness when she shook her head. “No, but you have to.”

My heart was broken already, I figured. So, I motioned for Dru to wait as I shifted the car back into drive and maneuvered around to the cell phone lot. When Dru started this story, I didn’t want to be interrupted by vigilant cops who didn’t allow cars to stop for longer than thirty seconds.

I’d barely rolled my car into the last spot before Dru began, “So Sharonne is a manager at the Coach store in the mall and I just happened to wander in there. She recognized me right away, but then she got a little suspicious and asked me if I worked for you.”

“What?” I leaned back to get a better view of Dru. “She knew that?”

“Yeah.” Dru kind of nodded and then shook her head at the same time. “I don’t know if she knew it from our circle or from Jeremy. But when she kinda shut down after I told her that I did work for you, I had to come up with a new game plan. So I told her that I worked for you once, but I no longer worked for you ‘cause you were jealous, out of control, and over the top.”