Page 55 of Justice

“Let’s go.”

I grabbed my jacket off the chair, followed him out, my mind already running numbers on lawyers and county commissioners instead of scars and missing sisters.

I was halfway down the hall when my phone buzzed. My daughter’s name lit up on the screen.

Can we do something just us this weekend? I miss you.

Two sentences that should’ve had me grinning like a fool. Instead I stood there a second too long, because Storie didn’t send me things like that. Storie sent me attitude and slammed doors. Then those one-word answers when she bothered to answer at all. I’d ask why later, because a father takes what he’s given, even from the one child who usually gives him nothing. But maybe our conversation in her mother’s closet had her moving differently. Maybe receiving her mother’s bracelet shifted her perspective.

Of course baby girl. But stop texting while you’re at school. I’ll take you shopping and we can go to dinner.

I put the phone away and kept walking, Prime already ten steps ahead of me with Dionne on speaker, county codes and zoning language flying past me like weather. I nodded in the right places, said the right things back, gave him every appearance of a man with his head in this permit fight. But underneath all that legal noise, quiet, was a woman with no sister in her file and a scar she wouldn’t explain, and a daughter gone suddenly, strangely soft, when soft had never once come free from her. And underneath even that, lower down, in a place I wasn’t proud of but couldn’t shut off either, was the memory of Skye’s mouth and the sound she made right before she broke, still running on a loop I couldn’t turn off no matter how hard a judge in Maryland needed my attention.

28

SKYE

I woke up with the ghost of his hands still on my hips, my body a live wire that hadn’t been switched off since Sunday night. I’d been thinking about him since I ran out of that theater. Thinking about his hands on my body. The way he felt deep inside of me. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. It was a line I shouldn’t have crossed.

Right behind the wanting, same as always now, came the dread.

The wine loosened my tongue and made me mention my sister. Why would I tell him that? It was the partial truth of what happened between my ex-husband and me. After all of the abuse and the set-ups, he eventually ended up with my sister. I suspect they plotted to be together for a while before they finally ended up together.

And she was with him in DC. This bitch had taken so much from me. What was she doing here with him? I’d gotten away from them. I’d done the work to set up a life far away. And there they were in the casino together.

When I mentioned her to him last night, I was so overwhelmed with hurt. I rarely thought of the role she played in my demise. But between that wine, his comfort, and the low lights of the theater, I opened up about some shit that I had been holding in for a very long time.

It was so damn reckless of me. My background didn’t hold up to scrutiny. It was a matter of time before Justice started to pull at the threads and I had to be out before that happened.

I was running out of days to be careless like that.

I’d started counting them for real. Some nights I lay in my room above his and did the math like a woman doing time, how many more weeks until I’d saved enough to disappear clean, how many days until Roman either forgot my face or found it again. I used to count down to freedom. Lately I’d caught myself counting down to the day I’d have to walk away from a man I had no business wanting in the first place, and that math hurt worse than anything Roman had ever put on my body.

I was still doing it in my head when Rita called for me from the sunroom.

“Everly.” Her voice carried down the hall, warm and certain. “Everly, girl, come here and sit with me.”

“Ms. Rita, it’s Skye. Not Everly.”

“Ev, you’re always playing games with me.” She patted the cushion beside her, not the least bit troubled by her own mistake. “You got such a good heart, you know that. When the time’s right, you’ll get him back. You will.”

“That’s what I’m working on,” I said, because there was no use arguing a woman out of wherever her mind had gone that morning. You met her there instead. Or perhaps she had a sixth sense about things. There was someone I was trying to get back.

“But then you’re gonna leave me.”

“I’ll always care about you, Ms. Rita.”

Two different conversations, running in the same room at the same time, and only one of us knew it.

She reached over and patted my hand like she’d settled something between us, then her face lit up with a memory only she could see.

“Remember when Jo-Boy hit you?” She let out a laugh, sharp and delighted. “Ooh, I didn’t know pretty dark skin could bruise up that ugly. I was so mad at that man. Told you to boil them grits hot and fry up that bacon. And he laid up in that bed hollering about wanting breakfast in bed.” She slapped her knee. “And you carried it in there and threw the pot and pan at him! Lord, Ev, I didn’t think you had it in you. But you got away from that man, didn’t you. You got away.” Her smile faded down into something quieter. “And you left me once. Don’t you do it again.”

I sat there with her hand in mine and let a stranger’s life settle over me like a blanket that didn’t belong to me, and it took everything I had not to let my face show what that last line did to my chest.

Rita coughed then, hard, a deep wet sound that doubled her over, and I was up and back with a glass of water before she finished the second round of it. She drank it slow, her hand shaking around the glass, and when she looked up at me again some of the fog had cleared.

“Thank you, chile,” she said, and this time she said it like she knew exactly who I was.