Page 49 of Buy Back My Love

The change in her was immediate enough that I knew I’d stepped into something before she even answered.

“I used to do nails.”

“Used to?”

She lowered her fork to the plate.

For a few seconds, she didn’t say anything. I was about to tell her she didn’t have to answer when she looked across the table at me.

“I just got out of prison.”

I wasn’t expecting that, and I sat back a little. “How long?”

“Five years.”

Five fucking years.

Looking at her, I would’ve never guessed she’d just spent five years in prison. Then some things started making a little more sense. The nearly empty house her mama had joked about. All the Amazon boxes. The way she’d talked about still getting settled.

I didn’t know what she’d done, and I wasn’t about to assume. “You wanna tell me what happened,” I asked, “or is that too much too soon?”

Leona looked down at her plate before answering. “Somebody tipped the feds off that there was drugs in my building. They found them, and that was all they needed to make it look like the shit belonged to me.”

“Did you know they were there?”

“Hell no. My lawyer argued them compartments could’ve already been there when I bought the building. The government said there was no way I owned that shop and didn’t know what was happening inside my own walls.”

“So whose drugs were they?”

She hesitated before answering. “They thought they belonged to somebody close to me.”

“Did they?”

Her eyes dropped back to her plate. “They couldn’t prove it.”

That wasn’t what I’d asked, and we both knew it. I gave her a second before asking anything else.

“Did they try to get you to give them somebody else?”

“Yeah.”

I watched her for a second. “And you wouldn’t?”

“I wasn’t putting nobody’s name on no federal paperwork.” She gave a small shrug, but there wasn’t anything casual about the way she said it. “I knew what saying his name would’ve done.”

I looked at her. “His?”

Leona went quiet again.

Then she said, “My man.”

That caught me harder than the prison part had.

“The one you’re with now?”

“Yeah.”

I stared at her for a second, putting together what she wasn’t saying. She’d spent five years in federal prison over drugs the government thought belonged to the same man she was still calling her boyfriend.