Page 48 of Justice

I had to press my hand over my mouth to keep the sound in. Because that man had no idea what he’d just said, or when he’d said it, or what he’d said it into. He’d just told me he always had time for me on the same night I found out my past was breathing the same air as him.

“Skye?”

“I’m here.” My voice came out almost steady. “I’m sorry. Everything just moved so fast. I’ll be back at the house tomorrow morning, I promise. Rita’s medication is in the⁠—”

“Don’t do that.” Gentle, but firm. “Don’t start working right now. Just tell me you’re safe.”

My eyes filled so fast I had to tip my head back against the seat.

“I’m safe,” I lied.

“Alright.” A pause. “Get some rest. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Goodnight, Justice.”

I hung up. Aubrey reached over without a word and held my hand the rest of the way home.

At her house I checked the front door twice.

Then the back door. Then the door out to the garage, and the latch on the laundry room window, and every window across the first floor. Aubrey stood in the kitchen doorway in her party dress and let me do it. She’s known me a long time. She knows there’s no talking me out of the walk-through, that it isn’t about the locks, that it’s the only thing that lets my body believe it’s allowed to sit down.

She’d made up the guest room already. She’d laid out a T-shirt and a pair of her shorts on the bed like she’d known before we ever got in the car that I would not be sleeping alone in my own place tonight.

I got out of that red dress and hung it on the back of the door. I looked at it a second, at that beautiful useless thing, and at the woman I’d been for about two hours while I wore it.

Aubrey knocked and came in with two mugs of tea neither of us wanted.

“Listen to me,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “He’s probably just visiting. Roman’s got money and he travels. It could just be a weekend thing. Something with his brother, or a game, or one of his little conferences. Monday he’ll be right back in Atlanta making somebody else’s life hell.”

“I hope so.” I took the mug and wrapped both hands around it, and I could not make myself feel the heat of it. “God, Aubrey. I hope so.”

Neither of us said the other thing.

That in five years of running, of new names, new towns, a life built out of nothing but caution, I had walked into one room on one night in one red dress. And he had been standing in it.

25

JUSTICE

Sunday morning I sat out on the back deck with my grandmother, drinking coffee, watching four men frame up a horse stable on my land.

It was a good sound. Hammers, a saw going, men calling out measurements to each other across the grass. The frame had gone up fast. By noon you could see the shape of the barn, the stalls, the tack room, the roofline against my tree line.

“That child is spoiled rotten,” Rita announced from her chair, not looking up from her crossword.

“I’m NOT spoiled!” Dream hollered from the deck rail, where she’d been posted since seven in the morning like a foreman.

“Baby, you got a stable being built in your backyard for a horse you been owning for eight days.”

“That’s not spoiled, Grandma Rita. That’s just having a horse. Plus I earned it, I’m a good girl.”

Rita laughed so hard she had to put the pen down. I sat there grinning into my coffee at both of them.

Truth is, I’d been watching the driveway more than the stable all morning. Skye had not come back Saturday. She’d said she’d be home in the morning, then she’d texted early that she was staying at Aubrey’s another night. Nothing wrong with that. Weekends were hers. That’s the deal I made with her, that Friday evening to Sunday she was a free woman with no obligation to me or this house, and I’d meant it when I said it.

I’d just gotten used to her being here. Fixed my mouth to complain about it and then remembered I had no right to.

So I drank my coffee. I watched some men build a stable. Every so often my eyes went to that driveway like a fool.