21. SKYE
SKYE
Some days with Rita were harder than others.
This one fought me from the jump. Not long after Justice left for work, she turned.
All that talk about the party must have stirred something loose in her.
One minute she was fine at the kitchen table.
The next she was up on her feet, gripping my arm, her eyes gone wide and far away.
“We got to get the cash out the safe,” she whispered, urgent, like she was letting me in on a secret. “Right now. Before they get here.”
“Before who gets here, Miss Rita?”
“The police.” She said it like I was slow.
“They coming to shut us down again. You know how they do. You pay them, they go on about their business and leave us be. But you got to have it ready, baby, you got to have it counted out and ready in an envelope when they knock, or they take the whole night’s money and run us all down to the station.
” Her hands were shaking. “Where’s the safe?
They moved the safe. Why would they move the safe? ”
I didn’t argue with her. You never argue with where their mind has gone. You go in and meet them there.
“I already handled it,” I said, easy and sure, taking both her hands in mine. “Counted it out this morning, put it in the envelope, tucked it right by the door. Soon as they knock, it’s ready. You taught me to always keep it ready, remember? So we’re good. We’re covered.”
“You counted it?”
“Down to the dollar. We’re safe tonight. Nobody’s taking anything from you. Not on my watch.”
It took a while. It always did. I sat with her, held her hands, let the storm move through her.
I agreed with everything and told her the club was locked up tight, the money was safe, the police were handled.
Little by little the fear drained out of her, and it left her tired and small, blinking up at me like she wasn’t sure how she’d gotten out of her chair.
I got her down for a nap after that. She slept for hours. These spells took everything out of her, wrung her dry. I sat outside her door a long while listening to her breathe, aching for these people who weren’t mine to ache over.
By evening the house was quiet, Justice still at work, both girls in bed, Rita down deep, and I finally took myself up to my room and turned the lock behind me.
I took a deep breath and exhaled the day away. I was slowly but surely getting my money in order to leave, but my strategy was still not complete. I had no way of getting to him yet. I didn’t even know how it would be possible yet.
But while I’m waiting, I guess I can enjoy the life that Justice has to offer. I was actually excited about going to the party.
Aubrey and I had texted a few times about it.
Her husband, Chase, had already promised to watch over the twins so she could come, and it felt so foreign I almost didn’t know what to do with it.
When was the last time I’d gone anywhere that wasn’t a grocery store or a job?
When was the last time I had a night that had nothing to do with survival or the long slow war I was fighting to get my life back?
It had been years.
And God help me, I was looking forward to it.
I took it in for a minute. Allowed myself to feel the warmth of it. Then, because I could not help myself, because I never could, I opened my laptop and typed the name I typed every few nights like pressing on a bruise to see if it still hurt.
Solomon Sheffield.
There wasn’t much new. A short piece, buried, the sort of legal update nobody reads but me. But it was enough.
Solo’s new team had filed for post-conviction relief. Due to ineffective assistance of counsel.
I sat back and let the words land.
I knew exactly what that meant. I’d filed enough of them myself in another life.
It meant his lawyers were building the argument that the woman who defended him had failed him so badly it cost him his freedom.
That a competent attorney would have won.
That the conviction should be thrown out because his counsel didn’t do her job.
It meant my name, my real name, was about to be pulled back into the light and dragged through a courtroom all over again.
Slow. These things moved slow, court time, a year, maybe two.
But it was coming. It was pointed straight at me, and it was coming.
And the terrible thing, the thing that bored through me every time I read his name, was that I couldn’t even be angry at Solo for it.
He was right to fight. He had been failed.
He just had no idea by who, or how, or that the woman he was blaming had walked into that courtroom thinking she had the evidence he needed in her hands.
I had it. I swear I did and then it was gone.
I closed my eyes, and the memory took me like it always did when I let it too close.
The night before, I’d had my babies for the evening. Court in the morning, so I had to run them back to their father’s. I remember I was sharp that night, all edges, my mind already in that courtroom laying out my opening.
He met me at the door of the big house in Buckhead, the one the judge let him keep along with damn near everything else.
He took up the doorway of a home I’d helped pay for, looking down at me with that smug little pull at the corner of his mouth, the one that said he’d already won and we both knew it.
And he had. He’d taken the kids more days than me, taken the house, taken my name off things I’d built.
He’d beaten me in that custody courtroom worse than he’d ever beaten me behind closed doors, and at least the bruises used to fade.
But winning was never the point with him. The war was over and he’d taken everything, and he still stood in that doorway looking for a new place to cut me.
“Big day tomorrow,” he said, softly, almost sweet.
As if he gave a fuck about my career. He didn’t care about shit but himself.
“Your big case. The one that’s gonna put you on the map.
” He tilted his head. “You look tired, baby. You should rest up. Wouldn’t want anything to go wrong for you up there in front of all those people. ”
“Listen, Keenan is having issues with reading in class. His teacher thinks we should get him tested for dyslexia. And Golden is sniffling, she may be coming down with a cold. Please give her, her medication,” I said ignoring him. We only needed to discuss the kids and nothing more.
“Mm.” He kept smiling. “I’ll handle it. Guess we can email about a time to get him tested. Wouldn’t want him getting behind.”
“Baby! Come in here, you’re letting all that cold air in.” Hearing her voice sent chills up my spine. I’d suffered injuries from his abuse but this kind of betrayal hurt even worse.
He pushed off the doorframe and started to close the door. “Get home safe, counselor. You have a big day.”
I drove home irritated and didn’t think another thing about it. That was the part I’d never forgive myself for. He’d stood right there and told me, in that slick, smiling, loving voice, exactly what he was about to do to me, and I was too deep in my own confidence to hear it.
The courtroom was full the next morning. It was a big case, press in the back, my client’s family in the second row with hope all over their faces because I’d put it there. I’d promised them. I don’t lose.
I stood up in my good suit and my expensive heels and told the jury I was about to show them proof, video proof, that my client was nowhere near that murder the night it happened.
Miles away. Time-stamped. A door-camera at one of his own properties catching him coming and going, clean as anything, the case falling apart the second they saw it.
I cued it up. I hit play.
And it was not my client.
It was me. It was me, on that screen, on that wall, blown up huge in front of the judge, the jury, the press, my client’s praying family.
Me and my husband, in a bedroom, in a video I did not know existed and had never in my life agreed to, the sound of it filling that silent courtroom before my hands even understood what they were seeing.
I was on my knees sucking his dick. It was an old video from a time when we were happy.
When I thought we were happy. Before the emotional abuse.
Before the manipulation. Before the cheating. Before the beating.
I lunged for the laptop and slammed it shut. Too late. Everybody had seen. The judge was shouting, the gallery was a roar, my client was staring at me like I’d put the noose around his own neck myself.
I tore through my files with shaking hands. The real video, the door-cam footage, the thing that would have walked that man out of the courtroom a free man, the evidence I had watched with my own eyes a dozen times.
Gone. No file. No backup. No record it had ever existed at all. And it was nowhere on my law firm’s servers either. Other colleagues had seen it. But now it had completely vanished. Houdini couldn’t have done a better trick.
It was like it had never been there. Like I’d made the thing up. Like I was exactly the incompetent, unraveling woman I looked like right then, standing in front of a packed courtroom with a sex tape still burning on the wall behind me and nothing, nothing, left to save my client with.
I knew right then. Standing in the wreckage of my life, I knew.
There was only one person on this earth with access to my devices, my files, my body, and the cold patient cruelty to use all three at once.
He hadn’t just beaten me. He’d made sure the world watched him do it, and made it look like I’d done it to myself.
I opened my eyes in a dark bedroom in Potomac and swiped the tears off my face before they could fall.
That was a long time ago. Another woman’s life. I wasn’t her anymore, the shark in the silk blouse. I knew better now.
I closed the laptop and set it aside.
But I decided I was going to that party. Two nights from now. One good night, borrowed against a life that owed me at least that much. I was going to put on a dress and stand in a beautiful room and, just for a few hours, be a woman who got to want things.
I’d earned that. God knew I’d earned that.