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Hours after I made Cheyenne a promise to help her with her grandmother, I found myself at my friend Nyasha's bar on a Monday evening, my hand spinning my whiskey glass in circles on the counter.
"What are you thinking about, Lexie? Ahh, don't tell me you're still sulking over Tendai's decision." Nyasha asked me, his eyes mocking as he propped his elbows on the counter. The nickname he used once aggravated me back when I'd first met him through Tendai, but now, years later, I'd grown to accept it. Plus, my nickname for him was much funnier, so I believed I had the upper hand.
Nyasha was Tendai's brother-in-law, married to her older sister Yemurai for nearly a decade now. He'd become a close friend and was one of the things I'd fought to keep during the divorce.
I squinted at him under the dimly lit lights overhead, my mind processing the amusement on his face after he mentioned Tendai's decision to send me to Pamoja. "Nyash, Did you know she was going to do it?"
"What? Pamoja?" he asked, putting glasses away in the cabinet behind the bar.
"Yeah."
"No. Look, when Tendai came to live with us to help take care of Yemurai after the accident, all she talked about was how stressed she was. Her sister wasn't well, her daughter was even worse in ICU. She didn't say one thing about you."
"You'd better not be saying all this just to protect your sister-in-law." I warned with a finger pointed at him.
Nyasha's boisterous laugh bounced off the walls. "My man, you're the one who needs protecting. Look where my sister-in-law sent you when she finally had time to deal with you after what you did to my niece."
"I hate the way your whole family is looking at things." I said seriously. "How many times do I have to point out that Rufaro's alive because of me?"
"You can stop pointing that out, first of all, Alex." Nyasha said impatienly, his authoritative use of my actual name reminding me that at thirty-five, he took advantage of our five year age gap and put his foot down whenever he liked. "Your arrogance will get you in trouble some day, you know that? We're not stupid, we know that Rufaro is alive because of your skilled hands. That's not the problem."
He took a moment to release a heavy breath. "The problem is you haven't once sat down to reflect on how dangerous your decision to operate was. Faro was on the thin line between life and death, Alex. What you did was reckless and impulsive and disrespectful to the mother of your child, who should have known what you were doing before you even did it. While you're patting your own back and considering yourself a hero, we're seeing someone who has the potential to cause some serious harm if he doesn't learn to control his impulses and speak before he acts."
