“Mmmmm.” The sweet taste of plantain explodes on my taste buds, and I squeeze my eyes shut in culinary rapture. “This food . . . damn.”

“What’d I tell ya?” Iz sips his rum before diving back into the plate of oxtails in front of him. “I love Miss Lilly’s.”

The Jamaican diner is packed, and the asymmetrical patterns and bright, clashing colors animate the space.

“And not too far from campus,” I mumble around a forkful of saltfish. “I need to bring Bris here. She would love this.”

“And I need to find a way to get paid every time you say that girl’s name.” Good-natured teasing gleams from behind his glasses.

I could tell him that she says the same thing about him. Over the last month, Bristol has settled in at our new place, and she teases me about how much I talk about Iz. We’ve become friends, but there’s still a level of awe I hold for him previously reserved for the likes of the MJs—Michael Jackson and Michael Jordan. It’s his ideas, his perspective that impresses me, though, not his prowess on a court or in the studio.

“It’s good,” Iz continues when I don’t answer. “You obviously love her.”

“Very much.” I gulp pink Ting, the cool liquid chasing the Caribbean flavors of my meal. “That’s my girl.”

“She’s ride or die, huh?”

I pause mid-chew as the memory of Bristol in the holding room, desperate, willing to bow to Parker’s sick demands to get me out of jail, jabs my brain.

“You could say that, yeah.” I consider him across the table. We haven’t really talked much about our personal lives. He knows I have a girlfriend I’m serious about and that she moved to New York with me. He knows, obviously, that I’m a musician, but most of our discussions have centered on mass incarceration, police brutality, and fatherlessness in the black community—issues we’re both passionate about. We’ve run the gamut of ills, and I admire his intelligence and insight more than anyone’s, but I can’t say I know much about him. He’s not what I imagined he would be. He’s a cool cat with his vintage kicks and elbow patch sports coats. Though I hold him in the highest esteem, he’s only a few years older than I am, I’m guessing in his late thirties. There has to be quite a story behind a guy as relatively young as he is accomplishing so much.

“What about you?” I probe. “Wife? Kids?”

He drinks his rum, his face unreadable before he replies.

“Divorced. One daughter.”

“How old’s your little girl?”

“She’s six,” he says. “She and her mom are still back in Philly. I see her all the time when I’m there, not as much while I’m teaching here this semester.”

“You got pictures?”

I ask because I know I’ll be obnoxious with my shit, showing everyone pictures of our kids once Bristol and I have them. I’ll be one of those dads. I never had one to be proud of me, but mine will, and if it’s a girl? I’ll probably buy my first shotgun the day she’s born.

A tiny smile cracks the impassivity of Dr. Hammond’s face as he pulls out his phone to show me his daughter. I see echoes of his features in her expression, but she must look a lot like her mother. Soft pigtails brush her shoulders, and her snaggle-toothed smile is adorable. I can’t help but wonder what our kids will look like.

“Man, she’s beautiful.” I hand him his phone, already feeling like I know him better just from seeing her.

“Yeah.” His gruff laugh lands in his glass of rum. “Fortunately, she takes after her mother.”

“How long you guys been divorced?”

“Much longer than we were married.” He grimaces. “Let’s just say I was more ready to be a father than I was to be a husband.”

I nod, leaving that alone unless he wants to elaborate.

Surprisingly, he does.

“Just be sure, when and if you take that plunge. Being unfaithful . . .” He leaves that comment on the table, polishing his glasses on the hem of his T-shirt, a habit I’ve noticed. “I guess it’s already pretty hard to stay faithful with all the ass that must get thrown your way.”

“Nope.” I shrug and turn my mouth down at the corners. “It’s just Bris for me. If she wasn’t the one, yeah, it’d be hard, but she is, so it’s not.”

It sounds too simple even to me, but I don’t know a better way to say it.

“No side chicks?” Surprise stretches his expression. “Groupies on the road?”

“Nah.” I shake the bottle of Ting over my mouth, teasing the last of it down my throat. “I couldn’t do that to her. Hell, I don’t even want to.”

If there are laws of attraction, she has rewritten them with a one-girl clause. I’m not blind—I notice when a woman is attractive, but actively want? Think about for more than two seconds? Just Bris.

“She must be something else,” Iz says with a smile. “I need to meet this girl.”

“She wants to come hear you at the Prison as Business forum in a few weeks, if she’s in the city. She travels a lot.”

“That should be interesting.” A frown settles between his thick eyebrows. “You know it’s basically a debate between me and Clem Ford.”

“That bigot.” Distaste for the man in question sours my meal and I put down my fork. “He’s making money hand over fist from prison labor.”

“At least he’s honest about his views,” Iz says. “Most of them lobby for longer sentences but never acknowledge the racism and greed underlying those polices. He’s an unapologetic bigot, and his radio show is his bully pulpit. He doesn’t hesitate to say black and brown people should be used this way, and he has an army of followers.”

Familiar frustration and anger seethe in my belly. That kind of systemic racism is blatant, and everyone else benefits—the people who lobby for longer sentences for nonviolent crimes, the businessmen exploiting prison labor for next-to-nothing pay, the bigots who believe those injustices are what we deserve. Everybody’s happy except the millions imprisoned, many unjustly, and the families splintered by it.

Iz’s phone buzzing on the table jars me from the thoughts darkening my mood. The name Callie flashes on his phone screen.

“Hey Cal,” he says, glancing at me and lowering his voice. “Yeah. I’m at Ms. Lilly’s with Grip.”

I gesture to a waitress and order another pink Ting while Iz listens.

“You don’t have to do that.” A frown puckers the straight line of his brows. “Okay. If you’re that close, then thanks.”

He ends the call, running his hand over the back of his neck, agitation clear on his face.

“Everything okay?” I ask.

“Yeah, that was my TA. I left my laptop in the lecture hall, and she lives around here. She’s bringing it by.”

“Oh, that’s sweet.”

“Sweet isn’t how I would describe Callie.” He chuckles. “But, yeah, I guess.”

Callista Garcia is a beautiful girl from what I’ve seen of her in class, petite with golden brown skin and a cap of silky dark hair.

“What is she anyway?” I ask.

He stiffens, his glass pausing halfway to his mouth.

“What do you mean what is she?”

“Like nationality.” I cock one brow and watch him more closely. “Ethnicity. She just has a unique look, and I wondered.”

“I think her mother is Dominican and her father is Asian, maybe Japanese, not sure.”

The woman in question walks through the door, and it’s fascinating to watch Iz’s response to her. His fist clenches on the table, and his lips tighten.

When Callie approaches our table, even her NYU hoodie doesn’t disguise the tight, curvy body underneath. Her short hair is rumpled like she’s been running her fingers through it, and she looks tired with shadows under her eyes. Her lashes frame dark eyes that shine with intelligence and curiosity.

“Hey Iz,” she says when she reaches our table and hands him the sleeve with his laptop. “Here ya go.”

There’s an ease to her, like she doesn’t realize she does remarkable things. When Iz introduced her on the first day of class, he said she graduated with honors from Yale. She’s a freaking Rhodes Scholar and is at NYU on some prestigious fellowship. The woman is brilliant, but you’d never know those things just looking at her. She looks like any other student schlepping around campus.

“I pulled some stats on Clem Ford’s business ventures and where they intersect with the prisons he’s invested in, along with some of his more incendiary comments.” She nods to the laptop case. “Slipped the printouts in there for you to look at when you get the chance.”

“You didn’t have to do that, Cal.” Iz frowns and looks uncomfortable for just a moment. “You’re my TA. I don’t expect you to do anything outside of class, and this debate is technically outside the purview.”

“I don’t get technical when I’m passionate about someone.” Her eyes drop to her fingers toying with the strap of her backpack. “I mean . . . about helping someone, about doing something I care about.”

“I know what you meant.” Iz scratches that spot on the back of his neck again.

The implications of the tension I’m witnessing between them are still crystallizing in my mind when Callie gives me her attention and requires mine.

“Hey Grip.” Something shifts on her face, in her posture, and she looks even less like the scholar I know her to be and more like a thousand other girls who have stuttered when talking to me since I started performing. “I haven’t gotten to tell you, wanted to give you space in class, but I loved your album.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Iz mutters, rolling his eyes.

We both ignore him, and I do what I always do when a fan says something like this: give her my sincerest smile and a few seconds of my time.

“Thanks, Callie.”

“‘Bruise’ was my favorite.” She peels back the sleeve of her sweatshirt to bare her wrist. “It inspired this.”

Scripted over the fragile skin of her wrist is the most famous lyric I’ve ever written: We all bruise.

“Wow.” I’m dumbfounded. Fans have done some outrageous things to prove how much they love me and my music, but there’s something about this brilliant young woman memorializing my words on her skin that moves me especially. “I don’t know what to say, Callie. I’m incredibly humbled by this, for real.”

“You graduated summa cum laude,” Iz says. “You were a Rhodes Scholar with honors. Fucking Yale. The administration plucked you from three hundred applicants to be my teacher’s assistant this semester and you want, what? Some rapper’s autograph?”

He bends a look of unnecessary apology toward me. “No offense, Grip.”

“None taken.” I laugh. “I am some rapper. I’m a lot richer than you, though. That’s a small consolation.”

“Asshole.” He chuckles and shakes his head at the smartass comeback.

Fortunately, neither of us takes ourselves too seriously, which is probably why we get along so well.

“I can be all those things,” Callie asserts, elevating one eyebrow. “And still be a fan, still love music, still appreciate a man who stands for something, who distinguishes himself from the rest of the herd and their bullshit. It’s why I wanted to work with you.”

She pauses just long enough for her words to sink in before going on.

“Was I wrong, Iz?”

The amusement withers on his face, and the current passing between the two of them makes me feel superfluous, like I’m in the way of something that started before I got here, something that has happened before.

“Thanks for bringing my laptop,” Iz says evenly, not addressing her question.

She lopsides him a grin that says, That’s what I thought, turns on her heel, and starts toward the door.

“See you gentlemen in class,” she tosses over her shoulder.

A hundred of my unspoken questions pucker the silence she leaves behind.

“Soooooo . . . have you two—”

“Don’t.” He aims a warning over the rims of his glasses.

I raise my palms up as defense against the intensity of that look.

“There was just a vibe, sexual tension or—”

“There’s no sexual anything.” His words slice into the space of the booth separating us. “She’s one step removed from being my student, and I don’t fuck my students.”

“Well, speaking as one of your students, I’m glad to hear it.”

The grin he concedes breaks the scowl on his face.

“I just wanna go on record as saying if you ever change your mind about fucking your students”—I knock back the rest of my Ting—“she’d be a great place to start.”