24. SKYE
SKYE
I was still sitting in the warm haze of it when Aubrey came back.
My chin still remembered his fingers. My body was still burning from that one long second where I almost let a man kiss me. Five years I’d gone without that. I sat there in a red dress, trying to talk myself down from something that felt dangerously close to happy.
Then I saw her face.
She came through those tables fast, purse-swinging, no grin, none of the loud joy she’d walked out of here with. She had that look I’d only seen on her twice in my life. Both times had been in a hospital hallway.
“We have to go.” She was already reaching for my hand. “Right now, Skye. Get up.”
“What?” I set my glass down. “What’s wrong? Is it Chase? The twins?”
“Baby, get up. Please.”
“Aubrey.” My voice came out strange to my own ears. “What is it?”
She crouched down beside my chair so nobody else could hear her. She took both my hands. Then she said the two words that ended my life for the second time.
“Roman’s here.”
I have never in my life understood the expression about the floor dropping out until that moment.
The music kept playing. People kept laughing.
Somebody nearby was telling a story about a bad hand at the tables.
All of that kept happening while every drop of blood in my body went straight down through the soles of my feet.
The room tilted about ten degrees to the left.
I gripped that table because I thought I might go down.
“No.” That was all my mouth would make. “No.”
“I saw him. Skye, I looked dead at him. It’s him.”
I was already standing. I don’t remember deciding to. My body had made the decision three seconds before my mind caught up, because my body remembered things about that man my mind had spent five years putting in boxes.
“Which side,” I whispered.
“Far side. By the long bar.” She got her arm through mine, and she turned us both toward the doors on the opposite end, putting herself on my right like a wall. “Walk with me. Don’t turn around. Don’t look for him, Skye, I mean it. Look at me.”
I looked at her. I walked. I have no memory of a single step of it.
I do remember the doors. I remember the cold air hitting my bare shoulders like a slap, and Aubrey’s hand tight around my elbow, and the valet asking us something neither of us answered.
I remember thinking, in the calm dead center of the panic, that I had left half a drink on that table and a man waiting on me who thought I’d be there when he got back.
We got in Aubrey’s car and she locked the doors before she even put her seatbelt on.
“Did he see you?” I asked.
She didn’t answer fast enough.
“Aubrey. Did he see you?”
“No.” She pulled out onto the road. “I don’t think so.”
I sat back against that seat and closed my eyes, because I don’t think so is not no.
I don’t think so is a maybe. Aubrey and Roman had been in the same rooms for years.
Cookouts. My baby shower. That awful Christmas party where he’d held my waist all night and everyone said what a good husband.
If that man’s eyes had passed over Aubrey Bennett’s face in that casino, he knew exactly who he was looking at.
“What is he doing up here?” My voice cracked down the middle. “Aubrey, what is that man doing eight hundred miles from Atlanta, in a casino, in DC?”
“I don’t know.”
“He doesn’t come up here. He has no reason to be up here. That’s the point. That’s the entire reason I picked this place. That’s the entire reason I’ve been up here scrubbing floors and wiping noses.” I had to stop and breathe. “That’s why I’m here at all.”
“I know, baby.”
“Five years.” I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes, careful of the makeup I’d spent an hour on like a fool, like a woman who thought she got to have a night. “Five years I’ve been so careful. I don’t have social media. I don’t use my name. I don’t even let people take my picture at church.”
Aubrey was quiet a second. Then, low: “He was with her.”
I laughed. It came out wrong, jagged and mean.
“Of course he was with her. That’s his wife now, Aubrey. That’s what wives do, they go to parties on their husband’s arm.”
“Skye.” She glanced over. “I just can’t believe she really went through with it.”
“Don’t.” I shook my head hard. “Don’t do that.
Don’t waste your breath being shocked. She got what she wanted.
She wanted my house, my husband, my life, and she got every bit of it.
” I looked out at the dark highway. “And she can have it. All of it. Because it is just a matter of time. Whatever he did to me, he’ll do to her.
Maybe he already has. She’s just still in the part where she thinks she’s different. ”
Aubrey didn’t argue with me. There wasn’t anything to argue with.
“I hope he’s visiting,” I said. “Please, God, let that man be visiting. Let it be a bachelor party or a basketball game or a funeral, I don’t care.
I just need him to not have moved here.” My hands would not stop shaking in my lap.
“I swear on everything, Aubrey. If he has moved anywhere near the DC area, I have to go. Again.”
My phone lit up on my knee when we were twenty minutes out.
It was Justice.
I stared at his name so long the screen went dark. Then it lit up again. I let it ring twice more before I answered.
“Hey.”
“Where’d you go?” No anger in it. Just that low careful voice of his, worried underneath. “I came back and your table was empty. I’ve been walking this whole floor.”
“I’m so sorry.” I closed my eyes. “Aubrey had a family emergency. We had to leave right that second. I didn’t want to pull you out of your own party to say goodbye.”
“Is everybody alright?”
“They will be. It’s handled. It just moved really fast.”
“I could’ve driven you home, Skye.” His voice pulled at me. “You didn’t have to run out of there like that. All you had to do was find me.”
“You had two hundred people in that room and half of them wanted something from you.” I tried to make it light. “Tonight was a work night for you. You would not have had time to sit and keep me company.”
“I always have time for you.”
Four words. In that voice. In the dark of my best friend’s car with my body still shaking.
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.