"What are you working on?" Malcolm asked Anika early Thursday morning. He expected Anika to sleep in late, but she'd been up for the past couple of hours working in the office. Anika did her most serious work in the large, cozy work room, where she could be alone with her thoughts. Other than Anika whistling "Waltzing Matilda" and the sound of keys clacking, the room was completely silent.

"I'm researching sushi restaurants," Anika answered, her eyes never leaving her laptop screen.

"Sushi restaurants? How come?"

"Because Cookie asked me yesterday if I could eat sushi since I'm pregnant." Anika smiled up at her unusually stoic husband. Unlike Anika, Malcolm was a morning person; he wasn't usually this quiet and still. "She's taking me out to lunch after I get back from the doctor tomorrow."

"You're going to lunch with Cookie tomorrow," Malcolm said slowly. It was a statement, not a question.

"We have some things to talk about. Some stuff that has to be addressed between us." When Anika checked her text messages that morning, she could hardly believe that Cookie had texted her about a place to eat on Friday. Cookie wasn't the only one who owed apologies. Elle Dallas. Beretti. Porsha. Hakeem. All the things Anika should have apologized for when Cookie came to see her yesterday were going to be addressed at tomorrow's lunch. Anika needed to make amends, just like Cookie had.

Anika noticed that Malcolm was slowly shaking his head, an unreadable expression on his face. "What's up?" Anika asked as she set her pencil down. Did Malcolm think that he was going to give her a hard time about going to lunch with Cookie? Or worse, was he going to try to say she couldn't go? Nothing was going to stop Anika from going to lunch with Cookie, no matter how Malcolm felt about it. "I know you think I'm crazy, Malcolm, but I'm pretty sure our catfighting days are behind us-"

"Anika..." Something in Malcolm's voice and his demeanor made Anika stop talking. "I just got off the phone with Rhonda Lyon. Baby..." Malcolm took a deep breath, exhaling slowly before he spoke again. "Cookie died in her sleep last night."

Anika heard her husband's words, but they made no sense. "Come again?"

"Cookie died in her sleep last night," Malcolm repeated. He swallowed a lump in his throat as he said the words a second time. "Rhonda called me after she couldn't get in touch with you. I guess Cookie still had my number in her old contacts or something. It wasn't a suicide or anything like that. They think it might've been a pre-existing condition...maybe a heart attack or something."

"Malcolm." Anika set her pencil down and stood on shaky legs. "I know you don't like Cookie, but this isn't funny."

"I'm not joking, Anika." Malcolm looked away, blinking rapidly. He'd be damned if he shed tears for his ex-lover in front of his wife. "Rhonda said that the last thing Cookie asked for was ice water from Andre. When Hakeem took the water upstairs a few minutes later, Cookie was already dead. She just went to sleep and never woke up again - where are you going?" Malcolm asked as Anika left the office without a word.

"To the hospital," Anika called over her shoulder.

"The hospital?" Malcolm followed Anika down the hall and into the bedroom, where Anika was changing out of her bathrobe into a comfortable pair of sweats. "For what?"

"To see Cookie," Anika answered, as if she was talking to a small child. "I mean, 46 is pretty early to have a heart attack, and I'm sure she's okay-"

Malcolm's shoulders sagged. "Anika," he said sadly.

"-but I just want to make sure she's alright. We're going out for sushi on Friday. Wait, I already told you that, didn't I?"

"Yes...you did," Malcolm said when Anika waited for a response. "But Anika-"

"Or at least we were going. We can't go now, obviously, with her heart attack and everything." Anika couldn't stop talking. She had to fill the silence. "So I'm going to swing by and make sure Cookie's okay."

"Anika. Listen to me." Malcolm reached for Anika, who snatched her hand away as she looked around for some shoes. "I'm not much of a fish eater, you know," she rambled on, "but I remember Cookie used to eat that stuff by the pound." Anika laughed, but it felt forced. "I wonder if I can sneak some in for her? That hospital food must be terrible, I'm sure."

"Anika..." Malcolm tried again.

"Then again, that kind of food might not be good for her heart-"

"Anika." Malcolm's patience was beginning to wear thin.

"But not eating isn't very good, either," Anika continued thoughtfully. "So I guess the question is whether it's better for Cookie to be eating unhealthy food or eating nothing at all." With shoes on and purse in hand, Anika finally looked over at her husband, who was staring at her strangely. "What do you think, baby?"

"Anika." Malcolm closed his eyes and pursed his lips, wondering if he hadn't made himself clear. "Cookie is dead, sweetheart. She died in her sleep last night."

"You've got it all wrong, Malcolm. Lucious died yesterday, sweetie," she corrected. "Cookie came and told me. And...and we talked, and-and-and...we're going out to eat on Friday. I mean, we were going out to eat..."

"Anika. Please." Malcolm crossed the room and tried to still his wife's busy feet. "Later, Malcolm," Anika promised, brushing Malcolm aside. "I'll be back in just a little while."

"Anika. No." Malcolm didn't stop his wife from leaving the bedroom, as he didn't want to physically restrain her. But he had no intentions of allowing Anika to continue this bizarre, macabre behavior. "Anika, Cookie isn't at the hospital. Are you listening to me at all?"

"I have to go..." Anika said again, bewildered.

"There's nowhere for you to go, Anika," Malcolm explained patiently. "Cookie is dead."

Anika slapped Malcolm across the face. "Shut up! Stop saying that!" she demanded. "Cookie's not dead! She's not!" Malcolm grabbed Anika as she swung at Malcolm again and again. "We're going out to eat on Friday! We're going to eat sushi and talk about poetry! She's not dead! She's not..."

"Anika...Anika..." Somehow, Malcolm was able to get Anika under control. "She's not dead," Anika wept. "Oh, God...please tell me this isn't real..." He guided her to bed, where Anika cried herself to sleep. "I never got to tell her I'm sorry," Anika wept.

"I'm sure she knew," Malcolm soothed his wife, but it didn't make Anika feel any better.

Three times Anika woke up and looked to her husband for conformation, and three times Malcolm nodded sadly. The answer was always the same. When Anika finally turned on the news and saw a picture of Lucious and Cookie's second wedding, she knew that Lucious and Cookie were both gone forever - or were together forever, depending on how a person looked at it.

Malcolm's place in music history was bad enough when he officially became the murderer of Lucious Lyon. But with the brokenhearted death of his wife the very same day, Malcolm and Anika began to plan to move to Anika's home in Cayman. Strangely, Malcolm and Anika had support in the most surprising of places: the Lyon family.

To our Empire family:

We are grateful for the many condolences and well-wishes bestowed upon us from friends, family and fans. In the wake of the deaths of Lucious and Cookie Lyon, there have been a number of concerns that the family believes that we need to address.

Many people have stated that our mother died of a broken heart. However, we like to think that our mother, who made our father Lucious the best man he could ever be, was rewarded with a seat by our father's side in heaven. Furthermore, we wish to remind the fans, the media and everyone else that there were no drugs, no alcohol and no medication of any kind in the body of our mother, Cookie. W e wish to make it clear that Cookie Lyon did not commit suicide out of grief for our father. To suggest otherwise does our family a disservice.

Additionally, the Lyon family loudly denounces any type of harassment, abuse or violence against the family of Malcolm DeVeaux. As determined by the doctors and agreed upon by the law, our father Lucious's death was a tragic accident, nothing more. In the final days of our father's life, the Lyons and the DeVeauxs made peace and extended forgiveness to one another. The Lyon family also extends our apologies to the DeVeaux family for this long overdue statement. We wish the DeVeauxs all the blessings that God can bestow upon them.

To any Lyon fans who want to maim and cripple and destroy in the name of our mother and father, we have this to say to you: do not buy our music, attend our concerts or follow us on social media. Do not let our names pass your lips. Lucious and Cookie Lyon never condoned retaliation against innocent people, and neither do we. If you are a fan of Empire Enterprises honor the memories of our mother and father by not participating in destructive behavior or spreading malicious gossip.

Finally, for those of you still grieving for the loss of our parents, take a page from the legendary Tracy Chapman and SAY HALLELUJAH! One of music's greatest love affairs has an ending that many of us can only dream of. Lucious and Cookie Lyon are together again until the end of time. What could be better than that?

Sincerely,
Andre, Jamal and Hakeem Lyon

Slowly, over the months, the public's hatred for Malcolm began to fade, and the world began to celebrate the lives of Cookie and Lucious, rather than mourning their deaths. In the meantime, Anika continued to teach at LaGuardia, while Malcolm returned to Columbia University in the spring semester. Little by little, Malcolm and Anika's lives went back to normal, and the two of them prepared for the birth of their first child, who was due at the end of May. Still, Anika silently grieved that she would never get the opportunity to tell Cookie that she was sorry...or so she thought.

Shortly before the end of the school year, Anika received a phone call from a small, unnamed post office box. The office was closing, the manager explained, and would be relocated to another side of town. "Would you like to pick up your possessions or have them transferred over to the new store, or will you be picking them up?"

"I'm sorry, there's been a mistake," Anika answered. "I don't have a safe deposit box at your store."

"No, ma'am...to the contrary. It appears that there is a package for you that was brought here by...let's see...ah, yes. Loretha Lyon."

"Cookie?" Anika's heart jumped in her throat as the manager informed her that the safe deposit box was opened the very day Cookie died. There were a number of things that had to be distributed, and one of the things that was to be turned over to Anika Calhoun DeVeaux in the event of Cookie's death was whatever was in the box.

It was a Friday, and Anika had three choices: come to pick the box up in a small New York down two hours away or have the box overnighted - which wouldn't reach her until Monday, as it was Saturday morning. Anika called Malcolm and asked him to pick the box up after work. At a quarter to five, Anika received another call from the post office box: Malcolm could not pick up the box. Anika had to be present, and she had to produce a government ID.

After nearly an hour of arguing and begging, the box was released to Malcolm after Anika faxed over two forms of ID, her marriage license and a copy of the faxed form varifying that the box had been released into her husband's care. "What did Cookie will you?" Malcolm asked as he drove home. "The contents of Ft. Knox?"

"I have no idea." Just hearing Cookie's name made Anika's heart race. Everything had finally started to die down. She could hear an Empire song on the radio without breaking into hives. Now this. Anika couldn't imagine anything that Cookie owned that she would want Anika to have.

"Do you want me to stay here with you while you open it?" Malcolm asked, lugging a medium-sized box into Anika's office. "Or do you want to open it by yourself?"

"I want to be alone for now." Anika kissed Malcolm's cheek. "I'll call you back in, I promise."

Alone, Anika held her breath as she carefully ran her letter opener down the mailing tape holding the box shut. She opened the box only to find more boxes. Anika took out the smallest box - a shoebox - cut the tape and lifted the lid. When she saw what was inside, Anika let out a small shriek and threw it on the floor, her heart pounding wildly.

"Anika!" Malcolm rushed into the room. "Baby, are you okay?"

"Yes! Yes, everything is fine. Just...give me a minute, okay?" Taking another deep breath, Anika lowered herself to the floor, though she had no idea how she was going to get back up. With trembling hands, Anika opened the shoe box again. It was full to overflowing with letters, pictures, postcards and scribbled notes.

There was also a sealed envelope with Anika's name in Cookie's beautiful, swirly handwriting. Inside was a letter, written on the day of Cookie and Lucious's separate deaths.

Dear Anika,

If you're reading this, then two things happened. One, I'm dead. Two, I haven't had anything changed from the day Lucious died.

After our conversation in your classroom, I can't tell you how much better I felt. There were things you know about me that I never told a soul, including my husband or my sisters. Even though it makes me nervous that you know the things that you know (honestly, I have no idea why I told you), I know deep down that you would never betray my confidence. That's why I believe that you are the only person I can trust to do what I'm about to ask you to do.

I'm leaving you all of my writings - my diaries, my letters from prison, my drawings...just about everything I ever put a pen to. If I die before writing my book, I want you to be the one to tell my story. Not THE Story, MY story. As of today, you're the only person I trust to set things right.

Maybe you'll take this time to get revenge on me and tell my sons everything I told you or let them read my secrets. I wouldn't be able to stop you. But I don't think you're that kind of person. I think you're the kind of person who can read my thoughts and know what to tell and what not to tell. There are lots of things I should probably go and cross out, but I'm just too tired to do it right now.

I can understand why you wouldn't want to be bothered with a thing like this. I really don't have the right to ask you to, considering our past. Feel free to destroy everything in this box. But I hope that you can understand why this is so urgent and so serious to me that I am writing this just a couple of hours after our lunch together. If you're reading this, that means that out of all the people in the world, you're still the only person that I trust to know my innermost thoughts and my true history. If you decide to do this for me, I know you'll do me and my family right.

God would have been kind if He had given me a woman like you for a daughter.
CL

Anika was sobbing by the end of Cookie's letter. Of course Cookie hadn't met anybody she trusted after having lunch with Anika - she'd died just a few hours later. Why me? she thought miserably. Why not her sons or her sisters? "Anika?" Malcolm called again, and when she didn't send him away, he came in. "What's wrong, baby? What did she leave you?"

"Her legacy," Anika whispered, numb. "Cookie left me her legacy."

Malcolm frowned. "Come again?"

"Her writings," Anika clarified, wiping her eyes and handing Malcolm the letter Cookie wrote. "Her journals, letters...she wants me to tell her story. Her story, Malcolm, not The Story."

Malcolm read Anika's letter and chose his words carefully. "Beautiful words," he said, and meant it. "But...don't take this the wrong way...why you?"

"Because there are some things that only the two of us know, having been in a relationship with Lucious," Anika answered. "That, and Cookie couldn't have meant this. If she had lived, she would've changed this, I know she would have."

"But she didn't live," Malcolm pointed out. "And you've always been sad because you never got to tell Cookie you were sorry for everything that had happened. Maybe..." Malcolm joined Anika on the floor. "Maybe this is your chance." Anika laid her head in Malcolm's lap as he continued. "You don't have to do anything, Anika. You can always turn everything over to the family. Or you can destroy it and make sure no one ever reads it."

"What do you think I should do?"

Malcolm thought it over. "Well, you've got summer break, minus your training and stuff. And you're pretty much free until the baby is born. I would look over the contents in the box before I committed myself to anything. And if I were you, I wouldn't tell anybody that you have Cookie's stuff, especially not her family. This is going to be enough of a headache without them going crazy because Cookie left her stuff to you."

Cookie's diaries were carefully written. Not even in her most private thoughts did she ever mention that there had been another man in her life before Lucious, or even that she'd dreamed of a different life. Rather, Cookie's diaries began from the time she moved away from her old neighborhood. Had Cookie not been a music producer, she would've been an excellent writer.

Anika wished that she could highlight Cookie's brilliant education, but Malcolm advised against it. "If you go too far into the past," he warned, "people might figure out that Cookie Holloway plus Lucious Lyon doesn't equal Andre Lyon."

So Malcolm knew. For some reason, that didn't surprise Anika. They never spoke of it again.

There wasn't much to change in Cookie's writings, save for sentence structure and punctuation. For the most part, Anika let Cookie's words speak for themselves. Parts of Cookie's diaries expressed her deep love for a man - a boy, really - that she had given up so much for. They also went into great detail about Cookie and Lucious's marriage, and how much Lucious sacrificed as well.

Other sections waxed poetic about the love Cookie had for her sons. Despite their ages, Lucious and Cookie were homebodies, preferring nights at home with their sons than hanging out on the streets. Cookie loved being a wife and mother, and her joy was expressed all over the pages. Other times, fear was expressed in a lot of Cookie's writings. She was terrified of being in the drug game, constantly writing about wanting a better life for her family. I'd do anything to get out of this. If I could do one thing over again, I would've stayed in school. Somehow, I would've tried to come up with a way to make it work...the worst thing I ever did in my life was drop out of high school.

Sometimes, Cookie's writings were very dark, specifically around the time Hakeem was born. Cookie's words and doodles strongly suggested that she suffered from postpartum depression, something that had no name back in the early 1990's. It pained Anika to think about Cookie's sons reading how sad Cookie was around that time, especially Hakeem. But it wouldn't have been right to remove the pages. If the boys decided to publish their mother's diaries, recollections like these might help other women and families understand what so many people dismissed as "baby blues".

As Anika's due date came closer and closer, she cried often, overwhelmed by the task Cookie had put in front of her. "I'm gonna have a nervous breakdown," she told Malcolm one day. "Why is she trusting me to do this?" When she wasn't sifting through the thoughts of a dope dealer's wife turned dope dealer herself, she went through her notes and scanned photos, letters and drawings.

"Anika, even the Lord took a day off," Malcolm chided one Sunday when Anika was in her office for three hours straight. But Anika knew she couldn't make a decision about what to do until she'd gone through every page, read every letter and saw every picture. To Anika's relief, most of Cookie's diaries and all of her drawings could be turned over to the Lyon family with no issues, something Malcolm agreed was the right thing to do. Anika couldn't face Cookie and Lucious's family with the writings she'd had for weeks, so she chose to mail a package instead.

Dear Andre, Rhonda, Jamal, Hakeem and little Andrea,

On the day your mother died, she opened up a safe deposit box and left me her writings. I'm enclosing a copy of the declaration. My guess is that Cookie did this on a whim. Had she not died the same night, I'm pretty sure the writings would have been turned over to Rhonda or one of Cookie's sisters.

Cookie wants me to tell her story (not The Story), but I wouldn't feel comfortable doing that on my own. I want the input of her family, the blessings of her sons. I'm turning over her writings to you to make the final decision. How about it, boys? Do you want to work together to get your mother's words out there? I was thinking that maybe we could just start with the first couple of diaries, the ones that go over her life prior to prison. Let me know what you think.

God bless,
ACD

"I'll take it right now," Malcolm offered. He was gone barely 20 minutes before Anika went into labor on the living room floor. Anika was anxious, but for some reason, she wasn't afraid. She could practically feel Cookie's hand on her back, convincing her to stay calm. "Breathe deep, stay calm...there you go." She could imagine Lucious encouraging her to stay strong with his sparkling green eyes. By the time Malcolm came home from the post office, Anika was already being loaded into an ambulance, singing a lullaby as their little girl drifted off to sleep.

"Waltzing Matilda, waltzing Matilda,
You'll come a-waltzing Matilda with me..."

Gazing down at her new daughter, Anika knew that Cookie and Lucious's story was just as pertinent to her as any child growing up in the ghetto. Anika wanted her to know about it when it was time to know about it. Maybe it would be in a best-selling novel, or maybe it would be from her memory alone. But her child would know about Lucious and Cookie.

"One day, sweet baby girl," Anika whispered to her daughter, "you'll learn about a love that was so pure and so true that not even death could put a stop to it. You'll learn about the love from a woman that was so strong that it redeemed a wonderful man, a man who gave up his entire future to raise a son that he didn't have to."

"He couldn't exist without her," Malcolm added, walking into the room with roses for his wife and sunflowers for his new daughter. "She knew that, if you ask me. Cookie guided Lucious to heaven, then she went and joined him to make sure he'd stay there. Say hallelujah."

"Hallelujah," Anika agreed, and she tilted her chin to exchange a kiss with her husband. "Would you want our love to be like that, Malcolm? Would you want the two of us to die like Lucious and Cookie did?"

Malcolm shook his head. "If anything happens to me, I'd want you to move on. Find someone else to love and raise our daughter. We can't all have a love like Lucious and Cookie, and if if they were here, they would probably encourage us not to try."

Malcolm carefully took their child from Anika's arms. "You know, Lucious told me that he hoped we had a daughter. He said that I'm the kind of man that should be raising daughters." Malcolm kissed his daughter on the cheek. "If our little girl is half the woman Cookie Lyon was, we will have done one hell of a job raising her."

Her name was Matilda Grace DeVeaux, but Malcolm and Anika called her Cookie. That way, they could honor Lucious and Cookie's love every time they said their daughter's name.

END