Page 80 of Justice

“What?” His groggy baritone filled the bed.

“We have to get up. Go out there and I’ll hide. Take her downstairs and I’ll sneak out of your room,” I said, offering my half-baked plan.

He dragged a hand down his face. The same hand that had handled me last night. Goddamn, I wanted him to touch me again.

“I’m up. I’m up.” He shook the sleep off.

He rolled out of bed and I went into his en suite. I could hear him scoop Dream up out in the hall and start toward the stairs with her.

“Where’s Miss Skye?”

“Doesn’t look like she’s up yet, baby. Still asleep. Let’s go make breakfast.” His voice moved off down the stairs. “Storie! Come down here for breakfast.”

I waited until I heard Storie groan, then footsteps heading down. The coast was clear. I needed to run to my room, freshen up, and get Rita going before anybody thought twice about where I’d been all night.

I eased his door open and slipped out into the hall.

And all the way down at the other end, Rita’s door opened.

I froze.

She stood there in her housecoat, one hand on the frame, looking straight at me coming out of her grandson’s bedroom at seven in the morning in yesterday’s clothes. For one long second neither of us moved.

Then that old woman smiled, slow and knowing, and gave me a wink. That wink accompanied a sassy smirk. Ms. Rita was fully there. Sharp as a tack, every bit of her right there behind it, no fog, no confusion, just Rita seeing exactly what she was seeing and blessing it.

She stepped back into her room and pulled her door shut without a word.

I stood in that hallway a second with my jaw to the ground, caught somewhere between mortified and cracked wide open. Because on a morning her mind was clear enough to catch me, she’d chosen to wink instead of judge. I went to freshen up before that could turn into tears.

Later that morning I was in the sunroom with Rita, working a lotion into her hands the way she liked, listening to her tell me about a man named Slick Eddie who’d apparently tried to short her at one of the after-hours spots back in the day.

“—and Slick Eddie thought he was gon’ walk out my club owing me three hundred dollars. In MY establishment. With MY liquor still on his breath⁠—”

“And Ms. Rita. What did you do?”

“What you think I did? I had Alexander wait for him in the parking lot.” She was laughing, sharp and clear, one of her good days. “Eddie paid. Paid that night, paid the next week for his trouble, and tipped the girls on his way out every time after that. Learned him some manners.” She patted my hand. “Wasn’t nothing in them streets I couldn’t handle, baby. Nothing.”

“Y’all busy?”

Justice filled the sunroom doorway with his keys already in his hand, dressed down, that rare loose set to his shoulders he only got when he was about to show off something he was proud of.

“I’m telling this child about Slick Eddie,” Rita said. “Pull up a chair.”

“Nah.” A corner of his mouth pulled up. “I want y’all to take a ride with me. Both of you. Come see Freetown. It’s finally starting to look like something out there, and I’m tired of just telling you about it.” He looked at me when he said the last part. “I want you to see it.”

Rita was already reaching for her cane. “Well, why you standing there? Go get my good shoes, the tan ones. I’m not riding through my Alexander’s dream looking like I don’t have sense.”

So he loaded us into the Maybach and drove us out to Freetown.

I’d heard him talk about it for weeks. I still wasn’t ready for the size of it.

It opened up on both sides of a brand-new road that didn’t exist on any map yet, acre after acre of red Maryland dirt turned into something with a heartbeat. Frames of what would eventually be houses marched in neat rows down streets that already had names on temporary signs. Reserve Way. Alexander Lane. Banks Blvd. Streets named for the family and the dream. Not little houses either. Big, generous, wide-porched homes with two-car garages and yards meant for children.

Farther in, a community center was going up with roman columns already standing white against the sky, a building that said you belong to something before you ever walked through the door. There was a rec center taking shape beside it, the concrete shell of what Justice said would be an Olympic pool. A market. A health clinic framed and waiting. Men in hard hats everywhere, dozens of them, laying brick, running wire, building it with their own hands. Cranes turned slow against a clear blue sky. Somewhere a radio played oldies, and a man up on a scaffold sang along to it, and the place buzzed with the particular joy of people building something they actually believed in.

Signs staked into the dirt showed renderings of what it would all become. Tree-lined streets in full green leaf. A splash fountain in a town square with brown babies running through it. Grandmothers rocking on wide porches, couples walking dogs down sidewalks that hadn’t been poured yet. And running through the heart of it, drawn up in loving detail, an old-style colonial main street. Brick storefronts with tall windows and striped awnings, gold letters painted on the glass, a walkable stretch of Black-owned shops and cafés and bakeries with lines drawn out the doors and around the block. A Black Georgetown, cut from nothing but red dirt and one family’s nerve. It was all still renderings and framing and promise for now, not a soul living in it yet, but you could stand there in the dust and see it breathing.

“Justice,” I breathed, my face all but pressed to the glass. “You’re building an entire world out here.”