38. JUSTICE
JUSTICE
Quest was waiting on me when they finally processed me out the next morning, leaned against his car in the visitor lot with a smirk on his face.
“There he goes.” He looked me up and down. “The infamous Justice Banks. Arrested at the mall like a shoplifter.”
“Keep fuckin’ with me, I’mma be right back in there for the same thing.” I laughed as I playfully shadowboxed him.
“Nah, nigga, you ain’t taggin’ my face. I shoots!
” He laughed, pointing to the gun in his waist. “But Prime already got your mugshot saved as his contact photo. We decided we wanna send it as our family Christmas card.” He handed me a water bottle I didn’t ask for.
“Get in. You smell like a holding cell.”
“Yeah, we’ll see.”
We got in his whip and pulled off. Quest’s jokes did help to lighten the mood. Then everything fell silent, and I started thinking about my bad-ass daughter.
“You good?” he asked after a mile.
“Not really.”
“Didn’t think so.” He drove a little. “I know we gotta handle whoever that was with my niece at the mall. But speak your mind before we get to the house.”
“That shit just don’t sit right with me. What is she doing? What do I gotta do to get her back on the right track?” I shook my head. “I might have to pull back from work for a while and focus on her. I gotta nip this in the bud. She’s out of control.”
“Whatever you gotta do, we’ll hold it down for you.”
“So here’s what’s about to happen.” I watched the road go by. “I’m gonna go home. I’m gonna find out how long this been going on, and who knew, and who helped. And every single person who had a hand in putting my fifteen-year-old in a room with that man is gonna answer for it. One at a time.”
“Justice.” Quest glanced over at me, and there wasn’t a joke anywhere on his face now. “You already know I’m with it. Whoever, whenever, however you want it done.” He looked back at the road. “Just tell me when.”
Two brothers. One car. No more jokes. That’s how you know it got real.
The house was empty when we pulled up, and empty was exactly what I needed.
Prime had already run the girls to school, because it was a school day and life doesn’t stop just because a father spent the night in a cage.
Skye had taken Rita to the store. So there was nobody home to look at me with worry, nobody to soften anything, nobody to talk me back from the ledge I had already decided to walk off of.
Quest posted up in the kitchen to wait for Prime to circle back. I went upstairs.
I didn’t take my coat off. I went straight down the hall to Storie’s room and opened the door without knocking, because she’d lost the right to a closed door somewhere around the time she disrespected me and skipped school. In fact, I was taking that damn door off the hinges.
Then I started taking that room apart.
Drawers first. Pulled them all the way out and turned them over on the bed, one at a time. Went through the nightstand. Went through the closet, the shoes, the coat pockets, the little zip pouches a teenage girl thinks a grown man will never think to check.
I found it in the back of the closet, tucked down inside a boot.
A pink round case. Half the little pills gone, punched out in a neat row, the days marked off in somebody’s careful hand.
It was some damn birth control.
I stood there holding it and felt the bottom drop out of the last three weeks, because a girl doesn’t get on birth control for no reason. She gets on it because she’s planning to need it, or because she already has. I did not know which one of those was worse. I did not want to know either one.
Then I pulled out her phone.
I’d had it in my pocket since the night I put her on punishment, the night she called Skye out her name at that dinner table.
Three months, I’d told her. No malls. No phone.
No nothing. And she’d looked at me like the punishment was a joke, because apparently it was, because a locked-up phone and a grounded girl still found her way to a food court to meet a man.
I sat down on the edge of her stripped-apart bed and went through it.
Of course I knew the passcode. The only way she could have a phone is if I did have it.
It didn’t take long to find him. A saved contact under a name that wasn’t a name, just an emoji, three hearts. It’s what a naive child uses when she’s hiding someone. I opened the thread and read it. And I went so still, so cold, that the room seemed to drop ten degrees around me.
Because he knew.
That’s what dropped me where I stood. In that food court he’d looked me in my face with his hands up and his nose bleeding and swore to God he thought she was eighteen.
And here it was in his own words, in writing, dated, time-stamped, undeniable.
He knew she was fifteen. She had told him.
He had typed her age right back to her, plain as day, and then he had told her exactly what he was counting the days to do to her once he got her alone.
: I can’t wait to feel your 15 year old pussy. I know it’s tight.
I set the phone down very gently, which is always the most dangerous thing I do.
He lied and I never planned on letting him get away with the lie. But now he was going to feel the brunt of my anger.
I heard the front door downstairs a little while later.
Dream’s voice ringing up the stairwell, high and happy, then Prime’s low rumble answering her, then Quest. My brothers could handle the little one and keep her distracted.
They would provide a warm wall between my youngest and what was about to happen at the top of these stairs.
Because Storie was home now too.
“Storie.” I said it once, from her doorway, down the length of the hall. “Come here.”
She came up the stairs slowly, and I watched the exact second she saw her room over my shoulder. The turned-out drawers. The bed. The closet standing open.
“Are you serious?” Her voice went up and sharp. “You went through my ROOM? You can’t just go through my stuff, that’s an invasion of privacy, that’s like actually illegal—”
“Illegal.” I let that word sit in the air a second. “You wanna talk to me about illegal today. You.”
“It’s my room!”
“Lil girl. Take that bass out your voice,” I growled as I stepped aside so she could see all of it, every drawer, every private little thing I’d turned over.
“You don’t pay not one motherfuckin’ bill under this roof.
Not the light you leave on. Not the water you waste.
Not the phone I’m holding in my hand. Not one nail in one wall of the room you’re standing there calling yours.
It’s mine. All of it is mine. So don’t you ever in your life stand in my face and tell me where I can and can’t go in my own house. ”
Her mouth closed and she backed away from me as if she were afraid I was going to hit her.
I held up the pink case.
The color went right out of her face.
“Where did you get this.”
“It’s not a big deal.” But her voice had lost its edge. “It’s not even what you think.”
“Where. Did you get birth control.” Each word its own sentence, because if I said them any faster I did not trust what would come after them. “You are fifteen years old. Who helped you get it. This shit isn’t your choice to make without my consent.”
She looked at the floor. Looked at the wall. Looked anywhere but at me. I watched her weigh her options in the cold, calculating way she weighs everything, and then she gave up the name because she had nothing left to trade.
“Kira,” she said. “Kira took me.”
I don’t remember walking to the study. I don’t remember the stairs or the door.
What I remember is standing at my own desk with my phone in my hand and Kira’s name on the screen, and a stillness in me so complete it should have scared me a lot more than it did.
She picked up on the second ring, careful, already knowing.
“Hey Justice, I’ve missed you.”
“You took my daughter to get birth control.”
Silence. Then the words came tumbling. “Justice, let me explain. She came to me. She was crying, she was embarrassed to go to you about it, I promise you it was not what you’re thinking, it was for her skin. Her hormonal acne.”
“You took my fifteen-year-old. To a doctor. And you put her on a prescription. And you did not tell me.”
“She made me promise not to tell you!” Her voice cracked high. “She said she’d never speak to me again if I said one word to you. I was just trying to be there for her like Monica would have wanted.”
“Don’t.” It came out like a blade. “Don’t you put my dead wife’s name in your mouth. Don’t you dare.”
She went quiet.
“You knew,” I said. “You sat at my table and knew my child was sneaking around. You took her to a doctor. You kept it from her own father because a fifteen-year-old asked you to. You picked her secret over her safety. Over me.”
“I was trying to protect her.”
“You were trying to be liked.” I heard it land on her, that little sharp intake of breath. “That was always your problem, Kira.”
“That is not fair.”
“You will never see my girls again.”
The line went dead silent.
“You don’t mean that.” Her voice had gone thin and scared. “Justice, those are my goddaughters. I have been there since they were babies. You cannot just do this.”
“I can. It’s done. You come near my house, my kids, or my grandmother, and me and you gonna have a different conversation. You’ve known me almost as long as you knew Monica. You know exactly what I am when somebody puts my children in danger.”
“She needed a woman in her corner!” Kira was crying now. “You got that nanny playing house in Monica’s kitchen and you’re gonna cut ME off? After all these years? You don’t know what you’re doing, Justice. You have no idea what you’re throwing away right now. None.”
Something under those words snagged at me. Some weight to them I couldn’t place.
I was too far gone to care.
“Goodbye, Kira.”
I hung up on her mid-sentence and set the phone face down on the desk.
I stood in that study a long while with my hands flat on the wood, breathing, trying to walk the cold back down to where I keep it.
It would not go.
My daughter had lied to my face. And Kira was complicit.
There was a grown man out there breathing my air who had put his intentions in writing about my fifteen-year-old and still had all his teeth, which was a temporary condition.
And I had just cut their godmother out of my children’s lives without a flicker of regret.
That last part was the one that stayed with me. Not that I did it. That I felt nothing doing it.
Maybe that was the exact thing I’d sat in a cell all night afraid I’d handed down to my girl.
I looked out the study window at all that land I’d bought to keep my family safe on.
I had never in my life felt less able to keep a single one of them safe.