“Have a good evening, Sloane,” he said to the woman Joy thought was his woman.
Sloane behaved as if she was his woman because she was floored that he was letting her off, and not Joynetta. “Sir?”
“That’ll be all. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Oh. I mean. . .” She glanced at Joy. “Yes sir.” Sloane got out of the car.
Joy should have been pleased the bitch was gone. And a part of her was. She couldn’t stand people like that. But as they drove away and she looked back at that massive Skeffington building and then looked at the man who just might own that entire structure, she wasn’t so much as pleased as completely confused.
After Sloane was dropped off, they rode in silence again. But whereas William didn’t speak with Joy while Sloane was in the car, mainly to keep Sloane out of Joy’s business, he was staring at her after Sloane was gone. With her little purse in herlap and her little hands on her purse, she still looked lost to him. She still looked traumatized to him. His presence, he realized, wasn’t making her feel safer.
“I’m sorry about what happened to you at my office, Joynetta,” he said to her.
She said nothing.
“You were here at my invitation, and I failed you.” She looked at him. “For that I apologize.”
But she continued to stare at him. “Why didn’t you look back at me?” she asked him with puzzlement in her extra-large eyes.
But he didn’t understand what she meant.
“I was calling your name. I was screaming your name. Why didn’t you look back?”
He could have said he didn’t hear her, but that wouldn’t be entirely truthful. He didn’t hear his name specifically, but he did hear a commotion. But even hearing his name would not have been unusual for him. People in need of help from a man with what they perceived to be loads of money to spare would go to any length to get his attention. Including showing up in his lobby shouting his name. That was why he never turned around. “I didn’t think it had anything to do with me,” he said. “I had no idea it was you until I got back from Europe a few hours ago.”
“You were in Europe?”
“The entire time you were incarcerated I was out of the country and knew nothing about it.”
That made Joy feel much better. The idea that he would let her rot in jail and do nothing about it was the part she would have had the hardest time getting over. He just didn’t seem like he would do that to her. But it still stung. “I was here to get a job. All I wanted was a job. But they said I was here to beat you up.”
William frowned. “Beat me up?”
“To assault you,” said Joy. “But that’s not true.”
“Of course it’s not true!”
“But they didn’t believe me. They were so mean to me. I even missed my bus.”
Ed Rivers, his driver, glanced at her through the rearview. The idea of the boss bothering with a woman that relied on bus transportation was amazing to him. But then again, they did pick her up from jail.
But William was confused. “What bus are you talking about?”
“The Greyhound bus I took to get here. Bridell is three hours away from Chicago.” Then she scrunched-up her face. “But that was five weeks ago.”
William was confused. “They didn’t offer you bail?”
“They offered it. Twenty-five-thousand-dollars was what they offered. They said I only had to come up with ten percent of it, which would have been two-thousand-five-hundred dollars. But they might as well have set that bail at a million dollars because I didn’t have that either. And everybody I knew couldn’t pull together no two hundred dollars, let alone two thousand.”
William could not have felt worse. He wanted to take her hand and reassure her that she was in good hands now, but he was certain she wouldn’t believe him. She was upset enough. He wasn’t going to compound her pain.
“Where are we going?” Joy asked him. “To the bus station?”
William found that an odd question. “The bus station? No. We’re going to my home. I have a guest room…”
“But . . .”
“But what, Joynetta?”
