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"Hello?" a voice surprisingly similar to Cheyenne's said into my ear, the seasoned British accent catching me off guard even though I'd known from the moment Cheyenne handed me the piece of paper with her details that she was no longer in Kitalo.
"Ma?" I prodded nervously.
My response was met with hesitation, her breathing audible through the line before she awkwardly said, "Yes, Bridget speaking. You said there was something you needed to tell me about my mother?"
Huh! What a great start we were off to. I blew out a breath and willed myself to be patient with this stranger that had ironically birthed me. It wouldn't help for me to get upset when I'd soon be joining the others in preparation for tomorrow night's show. As it was, I was already exhausted from travelling from Kinshasa to Nairobi with an anxious heart, wondering how this conversation with my mom would go.
"Wow," I scoffed with a shake of my head. "You can't even acknowledge that you're speaking to your daughter?"
"I... It's been years," she said, sounding flustered. "This isn't easy for me."
"Easy?" I repeated the word, noticing that my tongue twisted it into an offensive word, much like a profanity. "What made you think any part of this would be easy?"
I heard her try to respond, but she was interrupted by a rumbling male timbre, the man who'd come in gently asking if everything was okay.
"I'm fine, James, I'll be down soon." she said softly. There was a stretch of silence as she waited for whoever James was to leave. "Latoya, are you still there?"
"I am." I tried not to snap. "You were telling me how hard it is to let me call you mother when there's literally no one else I could address that way but you."
"Latoya," she said through an exasperated sigh and I decided I hated the way she said my name, as if I were someone she was conducting business with or something equally formal and unfamiliar. "I don't think I have to spell it out. We don't know each other well enough to dive into a mother-daughter dynamic."
"Why is that? Why don't I know you, Bridget?" I demanded as my voice grew louder. "Why did you let him take me?"
"You saw what he did to Charles. I feared that he might have killed us all if I fought to keep you." she whispered, her voice trembling.
"But he was killing me! I died a little every time he came around! Did you ever consider that my life with him might have been a total nightmare?" I croaked through a shock of tears and a lump in my throat. "Do you even know that I killed him trying to prot—"
"I know that he killed himself." she said defiantly, anger overtaking her other emotions. "What he wanted to do to you that day, it was too much even for him. He pushed you too far. That's on him. And you know what? Good riddance. He was not fit for fatherhood."
