27. JUSTICE
JUSTICE
I read the same line in that permit agreement four times and could not tell you one word it said.
My head kept drifting back to that theater.
Back to the weight of her settling into my lap in the dark, the sound she’d made against my mouth right before she caught herself and swallowed it back down.
I could still feel the exact shape of her hips under my hands, still hear my own name breaking apart in her mouth like she couldn’t decide whether to say it soft or scream it.
Any other woman it would’ve been a one night stand.
I’d be over it as soon as I nutted. But not with her.
She was a living, breathing thing inside of me.
Every hour since had me wanting to shut my office door, call her up, and hear that same voice say my name the way she’d said it with her lips against my ear.
I pulled her file up on my laptop, the one from the background check I’d run the week I hired her. I’d read it once back then, filed it, and moved on with my life. This morning I scrolled it slow with different eyes, looking for something I hadn’t gone looking for the first time.
She told me last night her husband left her for her own sister. That kind of thing usually leaves a paper trail somewhere, a divorce filing, an old address, a name on a lease. I went through that report twice and there wasn’t a sibling listed anywhere in it.
Maybe that’s nothing. Plenty of people cut family off and never look back. But something about it didn’t sit right with me. Something should’ve come up about a sister. What was she hiding?
I had my phone in my hand twice that morning, thumb hovering over her name, and both times I put it back down.
What was I even gon’ say? Good morning, I can’t stop thinking about your body, and by the way, who cuts a woman like that.
Wasn’t a version of that conversation that didn’t sound crazy said out loud.
So I sat there instead, caught between wanting to drive straight to my own house in the middle of a workday just to put my hands on her again, and wanting to pull every thread on her past until I understood exactly what I’d let sleep two doors down from my daughters.
I had two more clicks left in me before my office door swung open without a knock.
Prime came through it already talking, phone in one hand, truck keys in the other.
“Yo, we got a problem.” He didn’t sit down. “Judge out in Maryland just called an emergency hearing on the Freetown grading permits. County’s trying to block us before we break ground. Camille’s already headed to the courthouse. She needs us in that room in an hour or that judge rules without us.”
I closed the laptop. Whatever was sitting in Skye’s paperwork could wait another day. Freetown couldn’t.
“Let’s go.”
I grabbed my jacket off the chair, followed him out, my mind already running numbers on lawyers and county commissioners instead of scars and missing sisters.
I was halfway down the hall when my phone buzzed. My daughter’s name lit up on the screen.
Can we do something just us this weekend? I miss you.
Two sentences that should’ve had me grinning like a fool.
Instead I stood there a second too long, because Storie didn’t send me things like that.
Storie sent me attitude and slammed doors.
Then those one-word answers when she bothered to answer at all.
I’d ask why later, because a father takes what he’s given, even from the one child who usually gives him nothing.
But maybe our conversation in her mother’s closet had her moving differently.
Maybe receiving her mother’s bracelet shifted her perspective.
Of course baby girl. But stop texting while you’re at school. I’ll take you shopping and we can go to dinner.
I put the phone away and kept walking, Prime already ten steps ahead of me with Dionne on speaker, county codes and zoning language flying past me like weather.
I nodded in the right places, said the right things back, gave him every appearance of a man with his head in this permit fight.
But underneath all that legal noise, quiet, was a woman with no sister in her file and a scar she wouldn’t explain, and a daughter gone suddenly, strangely soft, when soft had never once come free from her.
And underneath even that, lower down, in a place I wasn’t proud of but couldn’t shut off either, was the memory of Skye’s mouth and the sound she made right before she broke, still running on a loop I couldn’t turn off no matter how hard a judge in Maryland needed my attention.