Tavarius turned slowly, his face flushed, lips twisting into a smirk that was half-amusement, half-threat.
“Excuse me?” he asked, a rumble rising in his voice. “You threatening me, old hag? What you gonna do? Hit me with your cast?”
He burst out laughing, and his laugh, coarse and barking, bounced off the high ceiling. “Oh, I’m so scared. I’m shaking.” He mocked me, turning to the guests, inviting them to join the ridicule. “Look, y’all, she’s timing me. Go ahead, count. 59 seconds. 58.”
I didn’t answer. I just watched the second hand trembling as it approached the vertical line. I knew something he didn’t. I knew that the mechanisms I had set in motion worked just as precisely as that clock. Tavarius didn’t know that the silence in this apartment wasn’t submission. It was a countdown.
The second hand completed its final rotation, and exactly at the moment it touched the 12, the pain in my arm flared with new force, seemingly transporting me back in time.
Exactly twenty-four hours ago.
That evening, the air in the apartment didn’t smell of roast duck. It reeked of the sour stench of fear and stale liquor. Tavarius was pacing the living room, bumping into corners. He looked like a trapped rat—sweaty, eyes darting, hands shaking.
“I need the money, you old witch,” he had screamed, spitting as he spoke. “Do you understand how much I owe? These ain’t jokes. These are serious people. They don’t send letters; they break legs.”
I stood in the doorway of my bedroom, blocking his path.
“This is my husband’s apartment,” I answered calmly. “And as long as I am breathing, it will not be sold to cover your gambling debts.”
That was a mistake. Not the refusal—no, the mistake was thinking I was still dealing with a human being. In that moment, the human inside Tavarius finally gave way to the animal terror of his creditors.
He lunged at me. I saw his dilated pupils, the whites of his eyes bloodshot map of his vices. The shove was sharp and unexpectedly strong for such a soft man. He didn’t just push me; he threw his whole weight into it, tossing me like a ragdoll.
I flew backward. My right hand instinctively went up to protect my face from hitting the doorframe.
Crack.
I would recognize that sound out of a thousand sounds. The dry, sickening snap of bone yielding to physics. In that second, the world narrowed down to a single point of agony in my forearm. A hot wave of nausea rolled up to my throat. I slid down the wall onto the hardwood floor, clutching my unnaturally bent wrist to my chest.
Javisha was standing in the hallway. She saw everything. She saw him wind up, saw the shove, heard that crack. But she didn’t rush to me. She just pressed her hands to her cheeks and whispered, “Mama, why you got to provoke him? Just sign the papers.”
Tavarius, breathing heavily, loomed over me. “See?” he wheezed. “Your own fault. Tripped, you old fool.”
He darted to the landline phone on the nightstand and yanked the cord out of the wall. Then he snatched my cell phone out of my robe pocket.
“No calls,” he growled. “Sit here and think. The notary is coming tomorrow at 8:00 PM. If you don’t sign nicely, I’ll put you in a home. I’ll tell him you’re senile and violent. I got people everywhere at City Hall. You know that.”
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