Love Lost by Love Belvin
Acknowledgements
Love’s Betas - My first official audience: Kelly Anderson, Tondalaya DeShields, Shantel Hansford, Angela Jennings, Yorubia Ardell Belvin and Juaquanna Gaines-Sams, thank you for your time and patience with my demanding timeline. Thanks for falling in love with A.D.! You ladies rock!
Emily Snow, I truly appreciate you taking out the time to advise me through the first critical stages of my dream career. May God increase you beyond your wildest dreams.
In-house editor: Zakiya Walden of I’ve Got Something to Say Incorporated. Your energy and consistency perfected this love story.
The Word Maid: Tanya Keetch, thanks for your editing services as well as your patience with me and my snooping in on my baby. You have the warmest energy. Thanks for everything!
Marcus Broom of DPI Designs, thanks for your talented artistry.
Juaquanna Gaines-Sams, you have been more than a friend. Try a manager, a designer, an editor and my first L.I.P. fan! Your honesty and confidence in me was hugely critical.
MDT, thank you for being all that you are, which is so much of me. I’d choose you as my boss again and again and again. #TeamMKT
To my Master, my Jireh, my Rohi, Philippians 4:13. I will forever worship You.
Chapter 1
Rayna It’s funny how a story can loop around to bring life full circle. It brings great perspective, simplifies repetitive life messages, completes revelations, and sharpens your lenses, thrusting you into realms of wisdom you never seemed to have grasped along the way. That is how my life has played out. I can now connect the dots that were laid out, some beyond my control and some by way of my own decisions.
There had been many nights when I’d awakened by nightmares of a gunshot. In my dreams, the bullet hits Jeremy aka J-Boog, a close friend of my brother’s, back in New Jersey and then it hits me clear through the heart. I grow frantic and most of the remaining night I lay with my eyes closed as I reminisce over my life. Dreaming about people from back home made my mind go back there for a while.
I think of my mother and how she began getting high back when I was in high school, in my sophomore year. How embarrassing was that? Most of the other children in the projects mothers or fathers started getting high either before they were born or during their elementary school years. Why did my mom decide to wait until my brother and I got into high school? It was humiliating. Everyone knew that she grew lonely once my dad, Eric, started creeping out on her with a woman on the other side of town. His betrayal weakened her and in turn destroyed our family. It damaged something in my core.
My parents married when she was twenty-two and he was twenty-four. Mom had an Associate’s degree in accounting while my father had a natural talent of working on cars. Eric, my father, always took care of my mom, Samantha, everyone who knew them would claim. He was very handsome and supposedly focused on his family. His mistake was moving us into the projects. Now, the projects were not a horrible place to live when they married. It was a starting point according to him. It’s clear my father got caught up in the game of believing our living there wasn’t on a timer. In a couple of years following their nuptials they had a son they named Akeem. Ten months later I came.