9. SKYE #2
“What’s the arrangement if it doesn’t work out?”
He tilted his head a fraction. “Meaning?”
“Meaning if you decide in three months I’m not the right fit, or Rita has a hard stretch and it’s more than one person can carry, or something happens on my end.
I’ve given up my apartment and my agency contract to move into your house.
So I’m asking what the terms are. Notice, severance, how long I’ve got to find somewhere to land.
” I heard the words leaving my mouth in a register I hadn’t used in years, crisp and certain, negotiating a separation clause like I was back across a mahogany table in a suit.
“I don’t move without knowing how I get out. That’s just good sense.”
The kitchen went dead quiet.
And his eyes stared deeply at me.
Not the way a man looks at his grandmother’s help.
He went quiet in a manner I’d only seen once before, the day I met him, that stillness that made everybody in a room feel it in their spine.
Except this time it was pointed at me. Nothing cold in it, either.
The man was curious, and curious was so much worse.
His eyes moved over my face slow, reading, recalculating, filing something away that I had just handed him for free.
“That’s a smart question,” he said finally, easy, light, and every hair on my body stood up because I heard exactly how not-light it was. “You think like somebody who’s read a contract or two.”
There it was. The X-ray. He’d seen the seam in me, the place where Skye stopped and the other woman started, and he was looking right at it.
I made myself laugh, soft and small, and pulled the caregiver back on over my head like a coat.
“My last family had a lawyer draw everything up,” I said, waving the dish towel. “Made me gun-shy, I guess. I just like to know where the door is. Old habit.”
“Mm.” He let it go. He let me watch him let it go, which was its own message. “I’ll have terms drawn up. Notice, severance, all of it. It’ll be fair. You’ll have it in writing before you move a box.”
“Thank you.”
He’d seen. And I knew he’d seen. And he knew I knew. We stood there in that kitchen with the thing sitting between us, both of us deciding to act like it wasn’t.
“SKYE.” Rita’s voice came bellowing from the front room. “You still here? Come get this child, she asking me questions I’m too old to answer.”
Dream had gotten dropped off, and she came barreling into the kitchen ahead of her great-grandmother, launching into a breathless report about a boy at school named Kaiden who ate a crayon on a dare and threw up blue.
“Blue, Miss Skye. Like he ate a Smurf. And then he cried and the class had to leave the room.”
“Not blue.” I pressed my hand to my chest, scandalized on her behalf. “A Smurf?”
“Yep, a Smurf!”
And then Rita, shuffling in behind her, deadpanned to the room at large, “That’s what happens when your mama don’t feed you. Child out here grazing on school supplies,” and she said it so dry, so certain, that it caught me completely off guard.
I laughed hard because it was so ridiculous.
And when I caught my breath and looked up, wiping my eyes, he was watching me.
Not filing anything away this time. Not reading me.
Just looking, with something soft and startled on his face, like a man who’d been shown a thing he wasn’t expecting and didn’t quite know what to do with.
For one second neither one of us was performing anything.
He’d seen me laugh, the real me, the one under the coat, and it had stopped him where he stood.
Then Dream tugged my hand toward the fridge. The moment broke, and we both looked away at the same time and pretended it hadn’t happened.
I told him yes before I left that evening.
Of course I told him yes. It was everything I’d come for. Deeper inside, closer to the money that was going to buy my way out of this nightmare, one more careful step down the road toward the thing I’d crawled through fire to get to. I should have been glad.
Sitting in my car in that driveway, though, wrapping my hands on the wheel, what I felt was the fear coming up the back of my throat.
Because saying yes meant giving up my one door.
My deadbolts. My little camera. The careful fortress I’d built out of a lifetime of being hunted, traded away to go live inside another person’s house, another person’s family, another person’s watching eyes.
I talked myself down. That was a thing I knew how to do.
My ex wasn’t going to come anywhere near a man like Justice Banks.
He wasn’t stupid. You did not walk up on a family like this one, not with their reputation.
Moving into the Banks house didn’t make me more exposed.
It made me untouchable. Nobody who knew what this family was would ever come for the house manager living inside it.
That’s what I told myself, sitting in that driveway.
I believed it, too. My chest let go. It had been clenched so long I’d forgotten it could open. Five years. That’s how long. I felt safe. But should I?