Two months before she died, that same phone call turned into a different kind of crying.
“There’s texts, Mika,” she’d said, sitting on my kitchen counter with her hand resting on the small curve of her belly. “From a woman named Vanessa. From his job site office. They’ve been going on for almost a year.”
I wanted her to leave him that same day. She didn’t.
“I need to protect the baby first,” she told me, and I didn’t fully understand what she meant until much later. “I already talked to a lawyer. I’m handling it the right way.”
That lawyer was Curtis Whitlow.
For six weeks, Layla quietly rebuilt her life around a truth she hadn’t shared with Terrence yet — that she knew, that she’d documented it, that she was protecting herself and Elijah financially before she ever said a word to her husband about the affair.
What none of us understood at the time was that Layla hadn’t just found out about an affair. She’d started receiving messages of her own — unsigned, from a blocked number, warning her to “let him go” and that she was “going to lose more than a husband” if she didn’t. She’d written about it in a small leather journal she kept in her nightstand, the same journal Mr. Whitlow now held a photocopy of, sealed in evidence, standing at the front of that church.
She hadn’t told Terrence about the threatening messages. She’d told her lawyer.
