A Baltimore love story · by Keke Fleming
Four years of love. Two weeks of fire. One secret that could change everything.
A Baltimore love story about loyalty, betrayal, and choosing the truth. Journey thought four years with Wesley meant they were building a future together. After betrayal, a new connection gives her a glimpse of something different, and one secret changes the choices waiting ahead.
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This is a work of fiction. Journey, Wesley, Mustafa, Shannon, Brittney, Milton, Lorraine, and Mama Cassie live in a Baltimore built from love, memory, and imagination. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental. This story deals with infidelity, pregnancy, and hard choices — read with care for your own heart.
For every woman who ever had to choose herself at a kitchen table, with her hands flat on either side of the truth.
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Chapters 1 and 2 are open to every reader. The remaining 28 chapters of Journey and Wesley's story open once your purchase is verified.
Chapter 1
Four years ago, Journey Edwards was not looking for love in the hallway at CCBC Catonsville. She was looking for Room 214 and trying not to be late for English Comp on her second day of community college, with a busted strap on her book bag and coffee already spilled on her sleeve.
Wesley Carter found her first. Six foot one, fade fresh, smile like he already knew her name. He held the door, looked at her schedule, and said, "You lost, beautiful?" Journey should have rolled her eyes. Instead she laughed, and that laugh changed the next four years of her life.
They were inseparable by midterms. Study dates at the library that turned into real dates at Mondawmin. Sharing fries, sharing dreams. Wesley wanted his own trucking company one day, said Baltimore had raised him hard but he was going to make it out right. Journey wanted to be a social worker, wanted to help girls who grew up like she did in West Baltimore with more love than money. He told her she had a heart too big for this city. She told him he talked too smooth for a boy who failed his first quiz.
By their second year, everybody called them Wesley-and-Journey like it was one name. He met her mama Lorraine, who sized him up over baked chicken and said, "He looks at you like you hung the sun, baby. Hold on to that." She met his people too, especially his grandmother, Mama Cassie, over on Park Heights, who pulled Journey into a hug that smelled like peppermint and wisdom and whispered, "You keep my grandbaby straight, you hear me?"
When Journey graduated and Wesley finished his CDL program, they got a little two-bedroom apartment off Liberty Heights. It was not fancy. The radiator knocked in the winter and the neighbors played music too loud on Fridays, but it was theirs. Their first night there, Wesley spun her around the empty living room and said, "One day I'm gonna marry you in a house so big this place could fit in the closet."
That was the Wesley Journey fell in love with. The one who warmed her car up in the snow. The one who left notes on the bathroom mirror. The one who held her when Lorraine got sick that one winter and did not leave the hospital chair for two nights. She held on to those memories tight in year four, even when the notes stopped. Even when dinner got cold waiting for him. Even when she started sleeping on her side of the bed alone and telling herself love was just going through a season.
On a Thursday night in March, she cooked his favorite - smothered chicken, rice, string beans - and set the table for two. She lit a candle like they used to. Nine o'clock came. Ten. Eleven thirty. No call. No text. Her phone lit up at 12:17 a.m. with a message from an unknown number, no words, just a picture that made her stomach drop before her brain even understood what she was seeing.
❧ End of Chapter 1 ❧
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