Page 23 of Justice

“It’s nothing I’m gonna talk about at a party-planning meeting,” I said, which was as much as they were getting.

Zainab’s mouth fell open. “Oh, it’s a somebody.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to. You made a face.” She turned to Mehar, delighted, scandalized. “He made a face.”

“I saw the face.”

“All of y’all are fired from my daughter’s party,” I said. They fell out laughing, and I let them have it. The alternative was letting them keep digging, and they were already too close to a truth I hadn’t finished lying to myself about.

Because there was a somebody. And the somebody was, at that exact moment, back at my house getting my grandmother settled for the night, wearing a name I couldn’t shake the feeling didn’t belong to her.

Later, when the binder was closed and the decorations sorted into bags by the door, Serenity hung back while the others carried things out to the cars.

“So I fly out Sunday,” she said. “Day after the party. The Kings want me settled before the quarter closes. I hate leaving with everything like it is right now. But…”

“It’s not running. You’ve been through a lot and you need a break from us. From DC. The Kings are gonna make sure you straight. We’ll hold it down.”

Her eyes went shiny. She nodded fast and looked away, and she didn’t argue, which is how I knew she needed to hear it worse than she let on.

“She likes Skye. She lights up when that woman walks in a room. Feels good, having somebody in that house who feels like family. Don’t it.”

I didn’t answer that.

I didn’t have to. My sister smiled a small, sad, hopeful smile and picked up the last bag. Then she left me standing in Mehar’s dining room with a truth I wasn’t ready to say out loud.

12

SKYE

The driver dropped the girls off a little after four. I heard Dream before I saw her, that quick light patter of a six-year-old who ran everywhere she went, calling my name down the hall before the front door shut behind her.

“Miss Skye! Miss Skye, guess what.”

“What, baby?” I came around from the kitchen and she launched herself into my legs like she hadn’t seen me in a year instead of since breakfast. I put my hand on the back of her head. My chest did the thing it always did with this child, went soft and stupid and unguarded before I could stop it. She brought up so many memories.

“We got to feed the class fish today. Both of them. And one is named Beyoncé and the other one is named Jeffrey.” She said Jeffrey like it was the funniest word in the English language. “Who names a fish Jeffrey?”

“That is a serious question. Jeffrey is an odd name.”

“That’s what I said!”

Storie came in behind her and slid her earbuds out of her ears. “I like Jeffrey. Reminds me of Dahmer,” she directed at her sister.

And then she slipped them back in. But didn’t speak to me. She never did. She’d made it clear from day one that I was furniture she hadn’t asked for, and I’d stopped reaching for a girl who didn’t want to be reached. But what she just said was disturbing as fuck. Does Justice know how off she is?

“I made y’all a snack,” I told Dream, steering her toward the kitchen. “Go wash those little hands.”

I’d cut apples and laid out the good peanut butter, the kind Dream liked, with pretzels and cheese in the sections of a plate so it felt like more than it was. Dream climbed up on the stool and narrated the rest of her day between bites. The fish, a boy who cried, a sticker she earned. I stood at the counter and let the warmth of her wash over me. I wouldn’t let myself sit with how much I’d started to need this. Storie took a plate without a word and stood at the far counter, apart, always apart, watching her sister be happy like it was a language she’d never learned.

Down the hall, Rita was parked in the TV room in front of her stories. Her new favorite show, Beyond the Gates. She hollered at that television like the people in it could hear her.

“Mm mm mm. Baby, don’t you trust that woman. She smilin’ too hard. That’s a smilin’-too-hard woman if I ever saw one.” A pause, and then, delighted, scandalized, to nobody: “See! What I tell you!”

I smiled to myself. An hour of peace, a happy child eating apples, an old woman fussing at her programs. Two weeks in and this had started to feel like a life. My life. A dangerous thing to let it feel like.

While the girls ate, I slid my phone out of my scrubs pocket. I tried to convince myself I was just checking the time. I wasn’t. I typed the name into the search bar, small, fast, in the corner of the kitchen with my back half-turned.