7. SKYE
SKYE
One week down. I’d survived my first week inside the Banks family. I had the sore feet and the full heart to prove it, and that full heart was exactly the problem. I could not afford to get emotionally attached to this family.
I swung by my apartment before dinner to shed the day.
Same as always, I worked the locks going in, top to bottom, then turned and threw every one of them again behind me.
I scrubbed through the footage until the rest of me believed what my eyes already knew.
Nobody had come. Nobody ever came. I checked anyway, because checking was the only religion that had never once let me down.
Then I peeled out of those scrubs like I was peeling off a second skin.
That was the part nobody warned you about a disguise.
You start to feel it grafting on. All week I’d been Skye the caregiver.
Soft, warm, harmless. Wiping counters, holding an old woman’s hand, being nobody at all.
Taking the scrubs off felt like remembering I had a body under there.
A whole woman, with a past and a temper and a mind that used to cut glass.
For one night I got to put her on instead.
I threw on jeans that fit like they meant it and a top that showed I still had something worth showing, and I did not look too long at the raised, ugly line riding above my heart in the mirror.
I knew it was there. It was always there.
I didn’t need to read it to remember what it said.
Then I locked my life back up behind me, top to bottom, and went to go be a person for a couple of hours.
Aubrey was already two sips into a glass of red when I slid into the booth, and she pointed at me before I even got my jacket off.
“Okay, talk to me. And don’t leave nothing out, I’ve been dying all week.” She flagged the waiter, ordered for both of us like she’d been doing since we were nineteen, and turned those nosy eyes on me. “How was it? These Banks people as crazy as the papers say?
“They’re not crazy.” I reached for the bread. “So far anyway. I get the feeling they’d do anything for each other. And I do mean anything.”
“Mm. So, crazy.”
I laughed. I hadn’t realized how badly I needed to.
“The grandmother is everything,” I said. “Rita. She’s so funny it hurts. She told me the first day I wasn’t the help, I was family, I just didn’t know it yet.” I turned my wine glass by the stem.
“Wow. They really like you.”
“They do and I feel bad, like I’m using them as a means to an end. You know? I don’t plan on being there longer than, what? Six months.”
“It’s a job. Don’t get too attached. You’re paid to do a job and that’s okay.”
“Yeah, you’re right.” It felt like something more than a job though.
“Okay and those brothers. Tell me about their fine asses,” she leaned in closer.
“Prime and Quest are taken. But they do look good. And then there’s Justice…” my voice trailed off.
“The middle one. You like him?”
“Aubrey! I don’t like him. I barely know him. He just looks good.”
“But he’s single?”
“I don’t know. He has two girls. I don’t know where their mama is.”
“I’m gonna Google,” she announced, whipping out her phone and fervently typing. “Ah-ha! His wife died three years ago. And according to Google…He might have a girlfriend…”
And God help me, my face gave me away before I could catch it. Just a flicker. But Aubrey was a bloodhound, and she came up out that booth like she’d struck oil.
“Skye. What was that? What was that face?”
“That was not a face.”
“That was a whole face! You just did a whole face about a man!” She was delighted, pointing at me, loud enough that the next booth looked over. “Oh, this is why I love a debrief. Tell me about it right now. I knew you liked him.”
“There is nothing to tell.” I couldn’t stop the smile, which just made it worse. “He’s Rita’s grandson. He’s my boss, basically. He is so far out of my league it’s not even a real conversation.”
“Out of your league.” Aubrey set her glass down slow, and just like that the play went out of her voice, gentle now, careful.
“Baby. There is not a league on this earth you are out of. You hear me? Whatever that man made you believe about yourself. Whatever any of them made you believe. It was a lie.”
Aubrey knew exactly why he was out of my league. Maybe five years ago he wouldn’t have been. But today, I was no match for him. Besides, those powerful men came with predator baggage.
“Anyway.” I cleared my throat and reached for the light again. “He’s not thinking about me. Men like that don’t.”
“If you say so.” Aubrey clearly did not say so. She stood, dropping her napkin on the table. “Let me go pee before this calamari comes. Do not touch my drink and do not have any more revelations about fine men without me. I mean it.”
“Okay girl,” I laughed.
While she was gone I picked up my phone, because like every other American I can’t just sit still in silence anymore. The aloneness and silence had to be filled with simulation from the pocket computer.
As soon as I opened it I saw a notification. It was an Apple News alert. I get like forty a day. I almost didn’t look. I’d have given anything, after, to have not looked.
But my eyes went to it the same as they went to everything, out of the old habit that had kept me alive, and I read the name in that banner before my brain could stop my heart.
I read the name in the banner and the restaurant disappeared around me.
The clink of glasses, the music, Aubrey’s laugh somewhere behind me at the bar, all of it dropped, and there was just that little glowing line of text and my pulse roaring in my ears.
A name I had buried in another life. A name I hadn’t let myself so much as think in three years.
And beside it, plain and quiet and final as a door swinging open in a house you thought was empty.
Solomon Sheffield conviction under review, new legal team files for relief
My hands went cold. Because a case reopened was a thread pulled loose, and I of all people knew where that particular thread led if somebody followed it far enough.
It led to a courtroom. It led to a woman who used to be me.
It led home, to the grave I’d dug for her and salted over, and it did not care one bit that I was finally, barely, learning how to breathe.
And underneath the fear, quick and ugly and gone before I could be ashamed of it, was the other thing. Hope. The thin, terrible sliver of it. Maybe. I hated maybe. Maybe was how women like me got found.
“Girl, that bathroom was a journey.” Aubrey dropped back into the booth, still talking, reaching for her wine. Then she looked at me, and she stopped. “Skye. What. What’s wrong?”
I couldn’t build a lie that fast. So I did the only thing I could do. I turned the phone around on the table and let her see it.
Aubrey read it. Her face fell, then went blank, then lifted to mine with an ocean of questions in it, questions she loved me too much to ask in a restaurant with cloth napkins.
“Skye—”
“It’ll be okay.” I turned the phone back over and slid it into my bag, face down, out of sight. My voice came out steady. I made it come out steady. “It’ll be okay, Aubrey.”
She held my eyes a long moment, and I watched her decide, one more time, to trust me over her own good sense. She reached across the table and squeezed my hand once, hard.
“Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay.”
The calamari came. We ate it. We even laughed again, later.
But I wasn’t at that dinner anymore, not really.
Some cold, calm, calculating part of me had already left the building and gone back to a courtroom three years and a lifetime ago, to a woman in a sharp suit who thought being right was enough to keep her safe.
God, she was a fool.
And one day, if I lived long enough and ran fast enough and never once got caught, I hoped to be okay again. Not her. She was gone. Just okay.
One day. I hoped to be.