Page 78 of In a Perfect World

“While I appreciate how you’re trying to let me off the hook, as a man, leaving you to make your way to Mexico alone will never be okay,” he replied seriously.

“You didn’t leave me,” I argued.“I left.”

“Maybe,” he conceded.“But I shouldn’t have gone back home when I couldn’t find you.I should have kept going until I reached the border, then searched the entire length of the region until I found you.”

“Well, I like to believe that everything happens for a reason, and I’ll never regret getting lost that day at the creek,” I told him.“I just can’t look around at where I’m at now and regret any of what happened.I know that’s easy to say because I hadn’t been harmed physically or anything like that, but I still don’t regret any of it.I mean...yeah, it sucks that my parents are digging their heels in, but there’s nothing that I can do about that, and I’m not going to let their rejection ruin this for me.”

His brows furrowed a bit.“You don’t think that they’ll ever come around?”

“Honestly, no,” I sighed.“But mostly because they’ll forever blame me for Tomasco leaving them.They’ll never accept that he made the decision on his own, and since they need someone to blame for the loss of their son, that someone will always be me.No matter what Tomasco tells them, they won’t ever take any kind of responsibility for how things turned out.”

“I’m sorry, baby,” he said, and I knew that he meant it.Coming from someone who was close to his family, he knew how much it hurt to have a person’s family fall apart.“I really hope they come around eventually.”

I thought about that before saying, “I’m not sure if I’ll ever be ready for that.Right now, the plan is to be with you forever, and if we ever have children, then they’re going to be half-Black.If my parents can’t see past their own beliefs to accept that, then I’m not sure that they’ll ever have a place in my life after this.”

Kairo cocked his head a bit.“Are they prejudice?”

“That’s the thing, I’m not sure,” I admitted.“Considering how restricted we lived, it wasn’t a topic that had ever come up at the dinner table.I mean, why would it need to be?”

He shook his head as he said, “And I guess that’s the difference when you come from a political family.We talked about everything under the sun at the dinner table.”

After a few seconds, I suggested, “How about we finish unpacking, then get some dinner?”

“Sounds perfect, baby,” he replied easily.

Chapter 40

Kairo~

As Triana and I walked back into the hotel room, my father’s question hit me again.He had asked me if I’d felt free, and I had naïvely told him that I’d had.However, after only a few hours of walking around Blooming Heights, I realized just how wrong I’d been.Real freedom was being able to live openly, and while there were still laws that needed to be obeyed, that was for the sake of safety, which was understandable.

“I’ve never had Chinese food before,” Triana remarked.“Isn’t that crazy?”

“Why not?”I asked.“Sterling Acres has a lot of diverse eateries, even if they’re run by Black people only.”

Triana turned to look at me.“Because my parents hadn’t been interested in raising us to explore other cultures.They’d been...dedicated to enriching our Hispanic community.”