34. SKYE
SKYE
Paranoia was keeping me up at night, and it was starting to show. My eyes looked sunken. My skin looked dull. Even with concealer, I had that same worn-down, half-haunted look I’d carried during the last few years of my marriage.
Back when sleeping beside Roman never meant I could actually rest.
I’d lie awake wondering what kind of argument he would start the next day. What innocent thing I’d say that he would twist into disrespect. What information involving the kids he was keeping from me just so he could watch me scramble after the fact.
Roman loved making me feel like I was losing my mind. He would move things, hide things, tell me conversations never happened. And whenever I finally broke down, whenever I cried or raised my voice, he would get calm. Almost peaceful. Like my distress was the lullaby he needed to sleep at night.
Once, my son begged me to bake my famous double chocolate chip cookies for a friend’s birthday party. I called them famous because he did, but they were good. Soft in the middle, crisp around the edges, with enough chocolate to make a child temporarily forget how to behave.
I made the dough the night before the party.
At some point, my baby girl started screaming from the other room. Not regular fussing either. She sounded terrified. I dropped everything and ran to her, and by the time I got her settled and made it back to the kitchen, Roman was standing near the counter.
He claimed he had only come in for water.
I didn’t think much of it then. I was too tired, too distracted, too accustomed to being on edge for reasons I couldn’t always explain. I finished the cookies, packed them up, and sent my son to the party the next afternoon, proud to be contributing something everybody loved.
A few hours later, the phone calls started.
Nearly every child who ate the cookies got sick. Stomach cramps. Diarrhea. Parents leaving the party early with miserable children doubled over in the back seats of their cars. Everybody assumed it was food poisoning.
And because they were my cookies, they assumed it was me.
I was horrified. I kept replaying every step in my head, trying to figure out what I could have done wrong. The butter was fresh. The eggs weren’t expired. I hadn’t left the dough sitting out. I scrubbed my counters before I started. I knew I had.
But by then, I had been married to Roman long enough to doubt things I knew.
Later that evening, I found an empty bottle of MiraLAX shoved beneath other trash in the bathroom garbage can.
I stood there staring at it until my body went numb.
There was no reason for it to be empty. No one in the house had been constipated. No one had mentioned needing it. And I knew, with the kind of certainty that settles into your bones before your brain is ready to accept it, that Roman had poured it into the cookie dough while I was distracted.
I was also convinced he had done something to make my daughter cry.
I could never prove that part. I couldn’t prove any of it. That was the beauty of Roman’s cruelty. He never did anything without leaving himself a door to escape through. By the time I confronted him, he was offended that I would even accuse him.
He called me unstable.
Said I was so desperate to blame him for everything that I was willing to invent a story about him poisoning children. Then he asked what kind of mother served food at a party without making sure it was safe.
That was Roman. He would cut you, hide the knife, then demand to know why you were bleeding on his floor.
But all of it had been punishment for something I had done.
At one of his work events, I had quietly pointed out that he’d dripped sauce on his tie. I hadn’t laughed, nor did I make a damn scene. All I did was lean toward him and whisper it because I thought I was helping.
But one of his colleagues overheard me.
Roman smiled at the time. He even thanked me. Then, on the ride home, he told me I had humiliated him. According to him, correcting him in front of other men had made him look weak. I had embarrassed him in front of people whose respect he needed. I had emasculated him over a drop of sauce.
A drop of sauce.
That was how fragile narcissists are. His ego was made of glass, and somehow everybody around him was responsible for keeping it from cracking. But only someone deeply disturbed would punish innocent children because his wife pointed out a stain on his tie.
Standing in Justice’s house now, I could feel those old memories moving through my body. Not like thoughts. Like symptoms.
My shoulders stayed tense. My stomach tightened every time I heard footsteps. Every sound in the hallway made me stop what I was doing and listen.
That little girl reminded me of Roman.
Not physically. It was the way she watched people. The stillness. The way her face could look completely innocent while her eyes remained busy, collecting information. She seemed to notice every weakness in a room and tuck it away for later.
And now that I had told her father what she’d done, I was waiting for her to punish me.
Would she?
Was she capable of that?
Or had Roman damaged me so badly that I had started seeing him inside anybody who made me uncomfortable?
I kept telling myself she was only a misunderstood child. That she was grieving. That her behavior was pain wearing an ugly little costume. That was what I told Justice, and part of me genuinely wanted to believe it.
But another part of me knew better.
Under the grief sat something sharp and deliberate. She let it show in quick flashes, then tucked it away before anybody else caught it.
I hoped I was wrong.
God, I wanted to be wrong.
But I was almost never wrong about danger. My only mistake had been waiting too long to trust myself.
I needed to get out of Dodge before the shit hit the fan. Before she exposed me to her father. Because I was sure she knew something about me. Maybe not everything, but enough to understand that there was a secret and that I was scared of anyone digging too deeply into it.
The way she mentioned court the other night hadn’t been random.
It reminded me of the ride to the party, when she casually announced that she wanted to become a defense lawyer. At the time, I’d dismissed it as another strange little comment from a child who enjoyed making adults uneasy.
Now I wasn’t so sure.
Maybe she had been studying me. Testing different words to see which one made my face change.
She had been dropping breadcrumbs and watching to see whether I followed them.
This little bitch was fucking with me.
And the worst part was, I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.
She was a child. Justice’s child. Any accusation I made would only make me sound cruel, paranoid, or threatened by a grieving little girl.
Or it would flat out reveal my lies. She could prod at every secret I had, and the second I reacted, she could widen those big innocent eyes and ask what she had done wrong.
I had no proof or leverage. I had no recourse with this little girl.
All I could do was wait for her next move.
And I had already spent too many years of my life waiting for someone dangerous to decide how they wanted to hurt me.
Quest had taken Rita for the day, doctor’s appointments first and then over to see Mehar and the baby after, which meant I actually had a few free hours. Aubrey texted before I’d even finished my coffee.
Aubrey: Meet me at the mall now. Bring your card and your problems.
I brought both.
We were three stores deep but I was barely there. My mind was everywhere but in that mall. Besides, I wasn’t buying anything. Buying clothes was a waste of money and since my timeframe was cut down from 6 months to 6 weeks, I needed every dime I could scrounge up.
“What’s wrong?” Aubrey asked.
“Huh?”
“Girl, I just told you that my husband wants to go to Brazil by himself and you ain’t even react.”
“Oh hell no. Chase is on some bullshit.
“Exactly. If he goes… I don’t know, we might need to talk to a lawyer. But what is up with you?! You’ve been out of it.”
“That little girl knows.”
“Knows what?”
“Who I am. Or enough of it to be dangerous.” I dropped my voice anyway, even though nobody was within twenty feet of us. “She keeps saying slick shit about court, about being a lawyer, dropping little hints just to watch my face do something. It’s a matter of time before she tells Justice.”
That got her attention. Aubrey set the shirt back on the rack and turned to face me full on.
“Okay, wait. Back up. You’re worried about Storie outing you, and that’s a real thing to be worried about. But that’s not actually what’s got you looking like this right now.” She studied me a second too long. “You’re falling for him.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.” She looped her arm through mine and steered us toward the food court, lowering her voice to match mine. “Skye. Listen to me. I love you, and I’m about to say something you don’t want to hear.”
“Here we go.”
“Play the long game. That’s it. That’s the plan you already made before any of this happened. Lay low, get your money together, get Keenan, get out the country. You don’t get to fall in love in the middle of an escape plan. That’s how people get caught.”
“I know that.”
“Do you? Because right now you’re worried about a fifteen year old’s feelings toward you, and baby, that girl is not thinking about your feelings at all.
She’s thinking about her daddy, and how she doesn’t want to share him, and she’s acting like a brat because that’s what girls that age do when somebody new shows up looking like they might actually stick around. ”
I wanted to argue that. I wanted to tell her it was more complicated than jealousy, that there was something colder sitting behind Storie’s eyes than a kid just missing her father’s attention.
But saying that out loud meant explaining things I didn’t have the energy to explain.
And the real issue is her telling him before I got my money together.
“You’re probably right,” I said instead, which wasn’t a lie so much as it was the easier truth to hand somebody who loved me and wanted me safe.
We headed to the food court where we got our pretzels.
Speak of the devil. I saw little Nightmare in the mall on a Wednesday.
She was standing outside the food court, near the escalators, next to a man who had to be in his late 20s.
That was not some damn high schooler. What is with this little girl?
He had his hand on the small of her back, guiding her toward a bench like they’d done this before, comfortable enough about it that my stomach dropped straight through the floor.
She was supposed to be in school. And then on top of it she was on punishment.
She didn’t care about consequences or getting in trouble at all.
“Aubrey.” My voice came out flat, urgent. “Don’t look right away, but look—that’s Storie right there.”
She followed my eyes and spoke through gritted teeth, “Oh, hell no. Who is that nigga?”
“Exactly! I can’t just walk past this and not say anything.”
I quickly pulled out my phone and called Justice.
“Come here.” I grabbed Aubrey’s hand and pulled her sideways into the shadow of a kiosk selling phone cases, both of us folding ourselves out of Storie’s eyeline just as Justice picked up on the other end.
“Hey, what’s up?”
“Justice.” I kept my voice down to almost nothing, watching Storie over Aubrey’s shoulder through a gap in the kiosk’s phone case display. “You need to get to the Pentagon City right now. Storie’s here. She is with a grown ass man.”
Silence on the line for a second, long enough that I could hear his breathing change.
“I’m on my way.”
The call ended, and I ushered Aubrey into a department store so that we could get out of her line of sight. I could not have her know that I was the one that snitched on her. That little demon would give me hell to pay.