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He was talking a mile a minute, and none of it was making sense to me.

“Whose car is that?” I asked.

“Maliah’s.”

I frowned because I had never heard the name before.

“Who is Maliah?”

“Tahari’s girl.”

That answer left me even more confused. I knew Tahari was seeing someone, but I had never met the young lady and knew very little about their relationship. I certainly didn’t know anything that would explain why my son had been angry enough to shoot at her.

“What did that girl do to you?”

I knew how women sometimes got in between men. The jewel between our legs could start wars, and every woman knew it. Giovanni’s jaw tightened as he turned away from me.

“She took my brother.”

The bitterness in his voice told me everything I needed to know about where his mind was. This wasn’t about something Maliah had personally done to him. This was about Tahari, and suddenly all the tension I had noticed between the boys over the past few months started making more sense. I watched Giovanni and Tahari grow up together. They had fought together, got in trouble together, eaten at my table together, and spent so much time underneath the same roof that I had stopped thinking of Tahari as somebody else’s child a long time ago. Even before either one of them knew the truth, they had called each other brothers because that was exactly what they were to one another. Finding out they shared the same father should have brought them closer, but by then there was already so much hurt between them that the truth seemed to make everything worse.

“Tahari has been choosing that whole fucking family over me,” Giovanni continued. “Every time I turn around, it’s Maliah, her daddy, her family. I needed him, Ma. For once, I really fucking needed him, and he had to think about whether he was going to help me because he made some promise to her daddy.”

Giovanni had always been possessive over the people he loved, and Tahari was no different. What Giovanni couldn’t seem to accept was that Tahari was changing. He had a job, school, a woman he loved, and people around him who were giving him the kind of stability he had never had before. I had offered a roof over his head, but with the way I worked, nothing about how I ran my household was stable. I could understand the boy wanting that stability. Still, Giovanni couldn’t; instead of seeing that as Tahari finally building something good for himself, Giovanni had taken every change personally.

“He was moving on with his life, Giovanni. That doesn’t mean he stopped being your brother.”

“He ain’t moving on. He is replacing me.” Giovanni pointed toward the television. “With them.”

“You know that isn’t true,” I said as I shook my head.

“It is to me.”

The certainty in his voice frightened me more than his anger did. Giovanni had convinced himself that Maliah and her family were responsible for everything changing between him and Tahari, and once he got something into his head, it was almost impossible to get it out. I looked toward the television again.

“So, you thought getting rid of Maliah would fix it?”

“Once I saw that car, I wasn’t thinking about fixing anything. I wanted her gone.”

There wasn’t an ounce of hesitation in his answer. I stared at him, struggling to reconcile the little boy I had raised with the grown man standing in front of me. I knew my son wasn’t innocent. I had never fooled myself into believing he was.

There were parts of Giovanni’s life I purposely didn’t ask questions about because I already knew I wouldn’t like the answers, but this was different. He had allowed his anger and hurt to convince him that another person deserved to die simply because Tahari loved her. The reporter’s voice pulled my attention back to the television when she repeated that a victim had been rushed to the hospital. My stomach tightened as I looked at Giovanni again.

“Did you shoot her?”

“I don’t know. I left before I could see who got hit.”

That explained the reason why he had been glued to the television. It explained the sweat, the bags, and why he had immediately stopped me from calling Tahari. Giovanni had been waiting for the news to tell him whether he had accomplished what he set out to do. As I looked at him, for the first time in his entire life I didn’t know who I was looking at. He had become a monster, but I swallowed hard and pushed down whatever I was feeling because, at the end of the day, monster or not, he was my son.

My eyes dropped to the duffle bag near his feet.

“Where were you planning on going?”

“I don’t know yet. I just know I can’t stay here.”

Before I could respond, his phone started vibrating on the kitchen counter. Giovanni glanced toward it, and the look that crossed his face caught my attention immediately. His anger disappeared for the briefest second before he looked away.

“Who is that?”