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asking, Minah, and then I won’t have to tell,” Fame had told her on more than one occasion. “But I respect you too much to lie to your face, baby girl. So why not do us a favor and spare us both the drama and don’t bother to question?” Aminah had shaken her head in disbelief.
    “How do you lie in bed next to Sean, profess your love for him, and then, hours later, be with another man?” she asked Langston.
    “It’s selfish, I know. I can admit that,” Lang said, shrugging her shoulders. “But I can’t help it. I can’t just end it. Not now. I’m in too deep. How does Billy Paul sing it? We both know that it’s wrong, but it’s much too strong to let it go now.”
    Aminah couldn’t stand what seemed to be Lang’s cavalier attitude. “And, really, Lang, how could you when you’ve watched me suffer through all of Fame’s mess?”
    “Unlike Fame, I’m not that arrogant,” Lang responded defiantly. “I have no intention of ever letting Sean find out. I love him too much to be so careless.”
    “You’re already hurting him and your marriage.”
    “How can I hurt him with something he doesn’t know about?” Lang asked.
    Aminah didn’t respond right away. She gazed at her best friend with tears brimming, waiting to spill over and run down her cheeks, but she wouldn’t let them. She batted her eyes and looked away.
    “If Fame were more discreet, and you never found out about the other women, would you be hurt, Aminah?” Lang asked more rhetorically than sincerely. “Could you be hurt? No, because you wouldn’t know.”
    “So that’s how you see it, huh?” Aminah asked. Lang raised her right eyebrow but said nothing.
    Aminah wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, slid her Stella McCartneys back on, climbed into her car and started it while Lang just stood there. “You want me to drop you off at home?” she asked through the lowered window.
    “No, I think—”
    Aminah didn’t even let Lang finish her sentence. As soon as she heard no, she pulled off, leaving her best friend standing in front of one of the handsome brownstones.

Chapter 5
    “Our bond is strong. Nothing and nobody can destroy it.”
    A minah was spent. Usually after her Sunday outings with Lang, she’d take herself to the movies before meeting up with Fame and the children for dinner at either her parents’ or his mother’s home. It was the only day Fame didn’t work in “the lab” or make the necessary music-industry party rounds. Sunday was his family day. Every day was family day for Aminah, of course.
    This Sunday, Fame, Alia, and Amir were visiting his mother out in Hempstead, Long Island. Aminah really wanted to skip dinner with Fame’s mother altogether and drive out farther east to visit her own mother in Sag Harbor, but she knew Fame wouldn’t hear of it.
    Her parents had owned their summer home out there decades before either P. Diddy or Russell Simmons ever discovered the Hamptons. The Philipses had purchased their beachfront property in Azurest in the early seventies right after Aminah’s father had opened his second dental office. He’d been the premier African American dentist serving the Hempstead community and had decided to expand his practice by opening a second office in St. Albans, Queens, doubling his patient load and tripling his income.
    Aminah’s dad had been a Howard University freshman rooming with a direct descendent of an 1840s black whaler whose family had owned property in Sag Harbor for almost one hundred years. One incredible summer weekend visit on the beach surrounded by so many prosperous black folks, and the young Nicholas Philips promised himself he’d someday own property in Sag Harbor’s historic, affluent African American community. Mission accomplished.
    Though Aminah loved her mother-in-law dearly and enjoyed Gloria Anderson’s company immensely, she needed guidance from a more mature woman of wisdom. Glo was more like an older sister than a mother-in-law. In fact,