5. SKYE #2
“You got the prettiest chocolate skin,” she said.
“Just as smooth. You know who you remind me of? My best friend Everly, God rest her. Dark and lovely, just like you. That woman could walk into a funeral and make it feel like a party.” She smiled at something I couldn’t see, sixty years back.
“Everybody wanted to be next to Everly. I lost her a long time ago now. Been missing her ever since.”
“She sounds like she was something special.”
“She was the best of us.” Rita patted the chair beside her. “Sit. You make me tired standing there like the help. You ain’t the help. You family now, you just don’t know it yet.”
I sat. And for a minute I pretended to be just a woman sitting with a grandmother in the sun.
We talked about nothing. Her stories, the DC she grew up in, the men she’d buried and the ones she should have.
She was funny, mean like only old women earn the right to be, sharp as a tack even when a word slipped away from her and she had to go around it.
I could have sat there all afternoon. That was the danger of it.
I forgot to be afraid. I couldn’t tell you the last time that happened.
Then she reached over and took my hand.
Her grip was stronger than it had any right to be. She looked at me, and the funny fell out of her face. An older, stiller look came up underneath it. She held my eyes like she was reading the fine print of me, the part I kept folded up small where nobody could get to it.
“You’ll get him back,” she said.
My hand went still beneath hers. I hadn’t said one word about him.
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe right.
My heart slammed up into my throat and sat there.
I hadn’t said one word about him. Not his name, not his face, not the six-month clock ticking behind everything I did.
I had buried him so deep inside me that some days I couldn’t reach him myself.
And this old woman I’d known for one afternoon looked at me over her reading glasses and pulled him up out of the ground like she’d watched me put him there.
“Miss Rita, I—”
“Mm.” She let go of my hand and patted it, already turning away, the strange stillness gone as fast as it came.
“Don’t mind me. I say things. It’s the age.
” She pushed herself up out of the high-backed chair.
“I’m gone lay back down. Get old, all you do is sleep and wait. Wake me for my program at four.”
And just like that she shuffled off toward her room, leaving me sitting in the sunlight with my pulse going like a rabbit’s, staring after a woman who had just seen clean through me with eyes that only got their sight back a month ago.
She couldn’t know. There was no way in this world she could know.
But she knew.
I was gathering my things to leave when the front door opened and the house filled up with them at once.
Justice. And two girls right behind him.
His presence filled the room and washed every bit of stagnant energy clean out of it. Soon as he stepped in, I felt it in my core, low and unwelcome. He had that thing you cannot buy and cannot fake, that quiet that makes a room straighten its back and lower its voice without knowing why it did.
Then the cologne reached me. Some niche, low-key expensive thing you had to be in the know to even recognize, nothing like the designer bottle you grab for your man at Christmas.
This was rare. Back in my other life I’d have ordered a sample of it just to decide whether it was special enough to gift a man I loved.
He wore a crisp white button-up open at the throat and a pair of gray slacks cut for him and him alone.
Even covered head to toe, I could tell the man was built.
Sleeves rolled to the forearm, all that muscle and vein and ink on display like an advertisement he wasn’t even running on purpose.
And Lord, the eyes. The mouth. The sexiest pair of eyes and lips God ever set in one face, and He had the nerve to put them in my path.
My body noticed him before my brain gave it permission to, and I hated my body a little for it. It just leaned toward him, the way a plant leans at a window, toward the one warm thing in the room.
And that right there was the danger of Justice Banks. Not the money. Not the quiet. It was that a man like him could make a woman forget she was running for her life. Make her set the bag down. Make her stay.
I picked the bag back up. Because let’s be so for real. I didn’t have a chance in hell with a man like that, and I didn’t want one.
“Miss Mercer.” A nod. Almost a smile, held back at the last second. “How was everything?”
“Perfect. Your grandmother’s resting. She’s amazing.”
“Thank you. Serenity texted, said she was running late. I know you’re off at six, so I figured I’d swing through and wait on her.” His voice moved over me slow and low. I made my face stay pleasant, blank, professional, its own quiet performance.
The older girl was already gone, drifting toward the basement stairs without so much as a glance at me.
Beautiful, but cold with it. A coldness behind the face that didn’t quite reach the surface.
I’d known a lot of teenage girls to go through a bitter phase.
Some of them never grew out of it. Some of them, I’d learn, weren’t going through anything at all.
They were just showing you exactly who they were.
“That’s Storie,” Justice said, and something crossed his face when he said the name, gone too fast to catch.
The little one, though. The little one planted herself right in front of me and looked up, unafraid, taking me in with big serious eyes.
“Are you Grandma’s new friend?”
“I am.” I crouched down to her level, down where a child lives, something I’d learned to do a lifetime ago. “My name’s Skye. What’s yours?”
“Dream.” She said it like the best secret in the world. “I’m six. I’m getting a pony.”
“A pony. Now that is serious business. And are you a princess? Because you sure look like a princess to me.”
She giggled, and my heart cracked straight down the middle.
Because there was a wildness in her joy, a way she threw her small body into being happy, and I knew that laugh.
I had lived inside that laugh once. I had a little person who lit up exactly like this, from the feet up, holding nothing back.
Golden. The name moved through me like a blade turned sideways.
I kept my face soft and my eyes kind and did not let one single thing of what it cost me show.
That was the discipline of my life now. Feel it all. Show none of it.
“Okay, Dream.” Justice’s voice, gentle on his baby girl in a manner it had not been on the other one. “Go on and spy on your sister for me. Let Miss Skye get on home.”
Dream skipped off, satisfied, and then it was the two of us in that front room with all that quiet between us.
“She likes you,” he said. “She don’t like everybody.”
“She’s easy to like back.” I got my bag on my shoulder. “You’ve got good girls.”
He didn’t answer right away, and a weight came up in his face that I recognized, because I carried the same size of it. Then he nodded. “Drive safe, Miss Mercer. Preciate you today.”
“Skye,” I said. “Just Skye.”
“Skye.” He said it slow, like he was tasting it, and Lord, I felt that low in my body, in a place I’d shut down and boarded over a long time ago.
I made myself walk to my car.
I got behind the wheel and did not pull off right away. I sat there in the driveway with my hands at ten and two and let myself want him for exactly the length of one held breath, because that was all I was ever going to allow it.
He was fine. Lord, the man was fine. Tall and rich, and for some women that alone would have been enough.
But then he had to go and be gentle with his baby and fierce about his family too.
Any other woman, one with a real name, a clean past, and a life that added up, would already be building herself a daydream.
But I wasn’t any other woman.
A man like Justice Banks did not end up with a woman like me. Men like him did not love women like me. They had us investigated. And if he went digging on me, nothing would come up at all, and somehow that was worse.
And there was the other thing, the thing a marriage had taught me in blood.
Men with that much money, that much power, that much quiet ease moving through a world that bent itself out the way for them, they were all the same animal underneath the tailoring.
Every last one of them a predator. Some of them just hid it prettier than others.
I put the car in drive and left the beautiful house behind me, and I did not let myself look in the rearview at the man standing in the window, watching me go.