10. SKYE
SKYE
“Do you want to store your things in my garage?” Aubrey asked as I sat outside of Rita’s house.
Today I was supposed to be packing a few things for her to come stay at Justice’s home. Serenity and Sarai have to leave for New York soon, so she was running around town getting ready.
“I was thinking about selling it all. I won’t be needing these things once I get enough cash out of this gig with the Banks family.”
“Just let me know.”
“I will. And thank you again for this gig. I’ll still give you your ten percent now that I’m getting double.”
“Appreciate it, but you know I wasn’t going to hold you to the non-compete like I do my other staff.”
“Girl, if it weren’t for you I wouldn’t have this gig. I’m giving you your just due.”
“That’s why I love you, Skye.”
“I love you too, Bree-Bree. I gotta get in here. We’ll link up soon.”
Once we were off the phone, I headed toward the house. I couldn’t lie. I was going to miss this home. It had so much character, and the neighborhood had wrapped itself around me warmer than any place had in years.
But there was a part of me that was excited about being in Justice’s space. I shouldn’t be. I hated how he made me feel. He was so distracting. And nothing was going to stand between me and this money. Not a damn thing.
Packing Rita up was like trying to move a cat into a bathtub.
“I don’t know why everybody keep acting like I’m on my deathbed.
” She stood in the middle of her bedroom directing me to the wrong boxes on purpose, I was almost sure of it.
“I raised four kids and a mess of grandkids in this house. Buried a husband out that front door. And now I’m supposed to pack it up in a weekend because my grandson wants me where he can watch me like I’m a pot about to boil over. ”
“He loves you. That’s all it is.”
“Love.” She said the word like it tasted funny.
“Love is how they get you to agree to things you got no business agreeing to.” She lowered herself into the chair by the window, breathing a little harder than she let on, and looked around the room at fifty years of her life in cardboard.
Her voice came down soft. “I been just fine in this house on my own. No offense to you, Everly. You know I love having you. But I don’t need nobody. I never did.”
Everly.
She’d called me by her dead best friend’s name, easy, certain, no idea she’d done it. I’d learned by now not to correct it. On a good day she caught herself. On a day like this one, sliding, I just stepped into the name and let it hold her.
“None taken, Miss Rita,” I said gentle, and kept folding her sweaters. “A woman like you was never gonna need anybody. Doesn’t mean you can’t let folks love on you anyway.”
She looked at me a long moment. I could see the confusion scrambling around to make sense.
Then she was back. She knew exactly who I was, exactly what she’d called me, and she didn’t say a word about it.
Neither did I. That was the deal between us, unspoken and holy.
I caught her when she slipped, and I never made her feel it.
“Don’t forget my throw.” was all she said, and looked back out the window. “My grandmother crocheted it.”
Justice’s house was not a house.
It sat behind a gate at the end of a long private drive, all clean stone and glass and old trees, the sort of place that didn’t announce its money because it had never once had to.
He gave us the tour himself, Rita on his arm, and I walked a step behind, cataloguing exits and sightlines out of the habit that had kept me breathing for five years.
He showed Rita her rooms first. A whole wing, near about, ground floor so she never had to fight a staircase, big windows looking out on the back garden, a sitting room off the bedroom so she could have her own company when she wanted it.
“I had them put your chair by the window,” he told her. “The high-backed one. Figured you’d want to see the yard.”
Rita didn’t say anything to that. She just squeezed his arm, and I watched the fight go out of her a little, because a man who moves your favorite chair before you arrive has already won an argument you were planning to keep having.
Then he showed me mine.
A room down the hall from Rita’s, bigger than my apartment, with its own bathroom and a window seat and a lock on the door I clocked before he finished the sentence.
One door. I checked. One door in, one window, and the window looked out on an open lawn with no cover.
A person would have to cross forty feet of grass to reach it.
I hated how fast my mind ran the math, and I hated worse how safe the answer came back.
“This work for you?” he asked.
“It’s more than I need.”
“If you need anything else let me know.” I made myself stop counting the ways a person could and couldn’t get to me in my sleep.
He’d ordered rotisserie chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes, corn bread and a chocolate cake from a restaurant.
Rita sat across from the girls. Dream narrated her entire day in exhausting, delightful detail.
Justice sat at the head of it all, quiet and watchful.
More than once I caught him looking at me down the length of that table, then pretending he hadn’t been.
I kept my eyes on my plate and my heart behind its wall and told myself I was being paid to be here, not to feel anything about the man paying me.
And then there was Storie.
The girl ate in near silence, like she did everything, those flat pretty eyes moving around the table taking inventory.
She hadn’t said ten words to me since I’d moved in, and I’d stopped trying to earn them.
But somewhere between the green beans and the second helping, she set her fork down, and she spoke into a lull like she’d been waiting for one.
“Did you know,” Storie said, to no one, to all of us, “that once they say you didn’t do it, that’s it? They can’t ever charge you again. Even if you went on TV after and said you did. There’s nothing they can do. It’s, like, a free pass.”
The table went a little quiet. Dream kept eating. Rita’s eyes came up.
And I opened my mouth before the careful woman in me could clamp it shut, because the wrong-in-the-room thing had always pulled the correction out of me the same way a struck knee kicks.
“That’s not quite how it works,” I heard myself say, even and easy.
“It’s called double jeopardy, and it only protects you after there’s a verdict.
It doesn’t cover perjury, so you lie under oath, that’s a fresh charge.
It doesn’t stop a civil suit, and it doesn’t stop the federal government from picking the same case right back up under a different law.
People think it’s a clean way out.” I reached for my water, felt the room, and softened it down to nothing. “It almost never is.”
The quiet held one beat too long.
Storie looked at me then, really looked, for the first time since I’d walked into her family. And it wasn’t a teenager’s look. What sat behind those eyes was cold, patient, old. She was taking inventory, like she’d just learned something about me she planned to keep.
Justice’s voice came in smooth over the top of it.
“You sound like a lawyer, Miss Skye.”
Shit. I have to learn to not speak this way in front of him. He didn’t look suspicious but if I kept this up he would. He trusted that Aubrey ran a good enough background check. And if he ran one, my past shouldn’t come up. I’ve paid a lot of money for anonymity but anything could happen.
“I watch too much court TV,” I said. “Bad habit.”
He let it go. The conversation moved on, Dream launched into something about a pony, and I sat there with my pulse in my ears and my eyes on my plate.
But I was watching Storie now. Watching her like I watched a room I didn’t trust. Because a fifteen-year-old girl doesn’t bring a thing like that to a dinner table for no reason.
She doesn’t research how a person gets away with something, memorize it, and lay it out cold in front of company.
She’d said it on purpose. She’d watched my face while she said it.
And under all that flat, pretty stillness, I saw the thing I’d spent my life learning to see in people.
Something in that child was not right. She was watching all of us. Waiting on something.
I’d know it anywhere. I’d been married to it.
“So this weekend.” Justice set his fork down.
“Dream’s birthday. Saturday. I know Saturdays are yours, and I’m not asking you to give it up for free.
But it’s gonna be a whole thing, family, kids, more people than I know what to do with, and it would help to have you there. You’d be compensated for the day.”
“Pony day!” Dream shrieked.
“We’ll see about the pony,” Justice said, and Dream vibrated in her chair.
“I’ll try to make it,” I told him. And I meant try like I meant everything, holding a door open behind me. A party meant more people. More faces. More chances for one of them to be one I knew. But Dream was looking at me with her shining face, and Lord, I could not tell that child no.
“Okay then,” Justice said, and the set of his shoulders eased, and I pretended not to see that either.
The sundowning came for Rita after the dishes were done.
It came like it always did, quiet first, then all at once. She was fine on the couch, and then she wasn’t, rising up out of her seat with her hands working at the hem of her cardigan, her eyes gone somewhere far back.
“I have to go,” she said, urgent, to the room. “The delivery’s coming. If I’m not there to sign for the ice, they’ll leave it on the dock and it’ll melt clean through before Curtis gets in, and then what are we pouring drinks over? Where are my keys? Somebody seen my keys?”
Justice was up fast, and I saw the fear flash across his face before he could hide it, that helpless dread of a strong man who cannot fix the one thing he’d give everything to fix. Dream had gone still and scared. Storie watched from the stairs with no expression at all.
“I got her,” I said quietly to Justice, and put my hand light on Rita’s arm. “Miss Rita. The ice already came, baby. Curtis signed for it himself, not twenty minutes ago. Everything’s handled.”
She turned those frightened eyes on me. “Curtis signed?”
“He did. Put it right in the back cooler, packed to the top. I saw it myself.” I kept my voice a low, warm current, gave her hands something to hold onto in mine.
“The club’s all set for tonight. You did your part.
Now the only thing left on your list is to rest, because you can’t run a room on no sleep. You taught me that.”
The panic drained out of her by degrees, the far-off place letting her go, and she came back into her own eyes tired and small.
“I taught you that,” she agreed, uncertain, holding my hands.
“You taught me everything.” I walked her slow toward her new rooms. “Come on now. Let me get you settled.”
I got her into bed and sat with her till her breathing went deep and even. When I finally stood in her doorway looking back at her, I felt the ache I could never afford. The one that came for me every time I loved something I was going to lose.
Justice was in the hall when I came out. He’d been standing there the whole time. He’d heard all of it.
“How’d you know to do that,” he said, low. “You went right into it with her instead of fighting her out of it.”
“Because arguing with where her mind is at only scares her worse.” I pulled the door to soft behind me. “She’s not confused about whether she’s confused. She just needs the world to make sense for a minute. So I make it make sense. That’s all.”
He looked at me in the dim hallway, and he wasn’t giving me the X-ray this time. This was rawer. And it stayed on me too long.
“Thank you,” he said. Just that. But the weight he put on it could’ve filled the hall.
I meant to go to my room. I truly did.
But when I came back down to get my phone off the counter, he was standing at the island with two glasses out, a bottle of red already open. He looked up at me like he’d been hoping for it and betting against it at the same time.
“House is finally quiet,” he said. “Everybody down. First time all day.” He nodded at the second glass. “You want one? You earned it about six times over today.”
I should have said no. I had a list of reasons why, and every one of them was still true.
But the house was warm and dim and hushed all around us.
This cold quiet man had just watched me love his grandmother back down out of a nightmare and told me thank you like it meant something.
And I was so tired of saying no to things I wanted.
“One glass,” I said.
He poured it and slid it across the island. I wrapped my hand around it and did not let our fingers touch, because I knew myself, and I knew exactly how little it would take.
“To surviving day one,” he said, and lifted his glass.
“Day one,” I echoed.
And I drank, and he watched me over the rim of his glass, and neither one of us said the thing sitting in the quiet between us. We just stood in his big silent kitchen at the end of a long day, two people with too many secrets and one glass of wine apiece, pretending this was nothing.
It was not nothing.
God help me, it was not nothing at all.