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downtown Newark. Our neighbors were young attorneys, businessmen, and local politicians. I knew I couldn’t put my nigger on in front of these bougie folks. I pressed a glossy thumbnail to the PDA to end the call. Hell with it. I was just parroting the other twenty messages I left since Goldie and I parted ways at the restaurant. I felt like a fiend chasing a fix.
    Wishing I was there. Feeling out of control. Thinking all kinds of crazy shit.
    Truth be told, sometimes it felt like I was losing my mind worrying about what he was up to. I loved that nigga. We was a team out there. I had his back and there wasn’t a damn thing I wouldn’t—or hadn’t—done for or to him. Nothing.
    I just didn’t know if he was holding me down with the same ferocity . . . or loyalty.
    “Welcome home, Miss Jordan.”
    I pushed my sixteen-inch jet-black weave behind my ear as I nodded my head in greeting at the uniformed concierge and kept moving across the polished floors to the elevator lobby. It was hard to ignore the sophisticated beauty of the décor. Twelve50 wasn’t shit like the Pavilion over on Martin Luther King Boulevard, where I had a shitty studio apartment that was smaller than Goldie’s living room in the low-rise projects where we used to strip on the weekends.
    The Twelve50 had a twenty-four-hour doorman and concierge service, a state-of-the-art health club with locker rooms and saunas, a six-lane bowling alley, an indoor basketball court, and an entertainment room complete with flat-screen televisions.
    Not bad for Newark. Not bad at all.
    Now I wasn’t crazy. I knew the building wasn’t touching the high life of those luxury apartments on New York’s Upper East Side. Far from it. Our rent was twenty-five hundred, not twenty-five thousand. Still . . . I was happy to leave that studio apartment on MLK behind when we moved in two weeks ago.
    As soon as I walked into our spacious apartment I immediately felt at home. The interior designer we hired took Make$’s need for dark leather and my love of soft neutrals to create a spot for us that was stylish and comfortable. I kicked off my heels and padded barefoot from the foyer. I stopped just long enough in the gourmet kitchen to set my hobo on the granite countertop and to pour a goblet of premium moscato before moving into the living room. The row of windows offered up views of the cityscape. Being on the thirty-first floor had us looking down at the city that raised us.
    Humph, he moved me up like George did Weezie, but as beautiful as our apartment was, the loneliness I felt? There wasn’t a damn thing pretty about that.
    I let out this pitiful-ass sigh into my glass, feeling sick and tired of my damn self.
    Brrrnnnggg . . . Brrrnnnggg . . . Brrrnnnggg . . .
    I took another sip of my wine and looked over my shoulder at the ringing cordless phone. Setting the goblet on the windowsill, I made my way across the hardwood floors to pick it up. It was the doorman.
    “Yes.”
    “Uhm . . . Ms. Peaches and guests are here,” he said.
    I rolled my eyes heavenward. “Okay, thank you,” I said, even as a fire fueled by irritation burned my stomach.
    Peaches and them was Make$’s mother and two sisters. All of them bitches had issues that kept them hopping on my last damn nerve. Lonely as I was, them hood hos was company I could do without.
    “Shit,” I swore, fighting the urge to block the front door with our sectional.
    Instead I rushed around the apartment and grabbed up my purse and any random bills or personal items we had lying around, including Make$’s stash of weed, coke, and pills from the huge wooden box on the oversize ottoman in the center of the living room. As far as I knew, Peaches smoked weed and got fucked up on the regular, but our apartment was not going to be her cop spot. I carried everything into our bedroom and set it on the middle of the bed, not taking time to notice the plush linen and décor—more of the stylish work of our designer out of