Let’s continue.
Edwin had told me to wait. “Just wait right here, Cam. I’ve got to handle something real quick.” Those were his exact words. He said them the way he always said everything—calm, smooth, like he was reading from a script written specifically to disarm me.
I had been with Edwin Thibido for three years. I thought I knew every angle of that man’s face. I thought I knew his soul.
I waited 20 minutes, then 40, then an hour. Jean started crying. I started crying.
A woman named Miss Allison—a stranger, God bless her—stopped her car at that bus stop, rolled down her window, and said, “Baby, are you out here alone?” And something in her voice cracked me open completely.
Edwin never came back. Not that night. Not the next morning. Not ever.
His phone went straight to voicemail. His mama’s number was disconnected. His cousin Patrick, who I’d always suspected knew more than he let on, stopped answering my calls after day three.
I was standing in the middle of my own life, holding a baby and absolutely nothing else.
And that was just the beginning.
Miss Allison didn’t just drive away. She got out of that car, took Jean from my arms without asking permission, buckled her into the back seat like she’d done it a thousand times, and drove me to a 24-hour diner on Beale Street called Ray’s.
She bought me hot coffee and a plate of eggs I could barely eat because my hands wouldn’t stop trembling.
“You got family?” she asked.
“My aunt,” I said. “Aunt Roslin, but she’s in Shreveport.”
“Call her.”
I called Aunt Roslin at 1:00 a.m. She picked up on the second ring because that’s who she was. Always ready. Always present.
She listened without interrupting while I told her everything.
When I finished, there was a pause.
Then she said quietly but firmly, “Pack whatever you can carry. I’m driving up by morning.”
That was the first solid thing I’d felt under my feet in hours.
The apartment Edwin and I shared was a two-bedroom off Summer Avenue. We’d been six weeks behind on rent. His name was on the lease. Mine wasn’t—something he had insisted on, saying it was easier that way. Now I understood what that meant.
I had 48 hours before the landlord called me, told me Edwin had given notice two weeks prior, and that I needed to be out by Friday.
Two weeks prior.
While I was still cooking his meals, still washing his clothes, still nursing his daughter.
I found a box of things under the bed he hadn’t bothered to take: old basketball cards, a broken watch, a photograph of a woman I didn’t recognize—pretty, laughing, standing in front of a house I’d never seen.
I stared at that photo for a long time.
I didn’t know it yet, but that photograph was the first thread, and eventually I would pull it until everything unraveled.
Aunt Roslin arrived at 6:43 a.m., driving her 2009 Buick with a thermos of chicory coffee and zero tolerance for self-pity.
She was 52, broad-shouldered, had worked 30 years as a paralegal, and had a way of looking at a situation that stripped it down to pure logistics before your tears even dried.
She took one look at the apartment, at me, at Jean sleeping against my chest, and said, “Okay. What do we need, and what do we leave?”
We left almost everything.
I packed Jean’s things first: formula, diapers, her little stuffed elephant she called Noo-Noo. Then I packed two bags for myself.
I took the photograph from under the bed.
Roslin saw me do it and didn’t ask why. She just nodded like she already understood.
Shreveport was four hours south. Roslin had a guest room with yellow curtains and a crib she’d borrowed from her neighbor, Mrs. Patterson.
I put Jean down that first night and sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and made myself a promise out loud, like a contract with the silence.
“I will never need Edwin Thibido again. Not for one single thing.”
What I didn’t say—what I barely admitted even to myself—was the second part.
I will find out what he did, and it will matter.
Those first months were brutal and beautiful in equal measure.
I enrolled in an online real estate licensing course using $340 I’d saved in a coffee can Edwin never knew about.
Roslin watched Jean during my study hours without complaint. I waitressed four nights a week at a Cajun restaurant called Landry’s where the tips were good and the regulars were kind.
Continued on the next page
