40. SKYE
SKYE
“Daddy? Skye?”
Dream’s soft voice tugged me out of sleep. Sunlight drenched my face in his massive bedroom. I was curled on my side, him flat on his back, one heavy arm still thrown across me.
I jackknifed out of that bed. His door was locked, thank God, but the sound of his daughter calling my name in the same breath as she said Daddy from the other side of it had my heart going like a fist on a door.
“Fuck,” I whimpered.
I was not supposed to sleep in here. I didn’t want the girls to know about us. I didn’t want Storie to know this much about us. What was I thinking? I was so mortified.
I shoved him, forcing him out of the most peaceful sleep I’d ever seen on his face. I hated to do it. But the little one was up, and the rest of the house would follow.
“What?” His groggy baritone filled the bed.
“We have to get up. Go out there and I’ll hide. Take her downstairs and I’ll sneak out of your room,” I said, offering my half-baked plan.
He dragged a hand down his face. The same hand that had handled me last night. Goddamn, I wanted him to touch me again.
“I’m up. I’m up.” He shook the sleep off.
He rolled out of bed and I went into his en suite. I could hear him scoop Dream up out in the hall and start toward the stairs with her.
“Where’s Miss Skye?”
“Doesn’t look like she’s up yet, baby. Still asleep. Let’s go make breakfast.” His voice moved off down the stairs. “Storie! Come down here for breakfast.”
I waited until I heard Storie groan, then footsteps heading down. The coast was clear. I needed to run to my room, freshen up, and get Rita going before anybody thought twice about where I’d been all night.
I eased his door open and slipped out into the hall.
And all the way down at the other end, Rita’s door opened.
I froze.
She stood there in her housecoat, one hand on the frame, looking straight at me coming out of her grandson’s bedroom at seven in the morning in yesterday’s clothes. For one long second neither of us moved.
Then that old woman smiled, slow and knowing, and gave me a wink. That wink accompanied a sassy smirk. Ms. Rita was fully there. Sharp as a tack, every bit of her right there behind it, no fog, no confusion, just Rita seeing exactly what she was seeing and blessing it.
She stepped back into her room and pulled her door shut without a word.
I stood in that hallway a second with my jaw to the ground, caught somewhere between mortified and cracked wide open. Because on a morning her mind was clear enough to catch me, she’d chosen to wink instead of judge. I went to freshen up before that could turn into tears.
Later that morning I was in the sunroom with Rita, working a lotion into her hands the way she liked, listening to her tell me about a man named Slick Eddie who’d apparently tried to short her at one of the after-hours spots back in the day.
“—and Slick Eddie thought he was gon’ walk out my club owing me three hundred dollars. In MY establishment. With MY liquor still on his breath—”
“And Ms. Rita. What did you do?”
“What you think I did? I had Alexander wait for him in the parking lot.” She was laughing, sharp and clear, one of her good days.
“Eddie paid. Paid that night, paid the next week for his trouble, and tipped the girls on his way out every time after that. Learned him some manners.” She patted my hand.
“Wasn’t nothing in them streets I couldn’t handle, baby. Nothing.”
“Y’all busy?”
Justice filled the sunroom doorway with his keys already in his hand, dressed down, that rare loose set to his shoulders he only got when he was about to show off something he was proud of.
“I’m telling this child about Slick Eddie,” Rita said. “Pull up a chair.”
“Nah.” A corner of his mouth pulled up. “I want y’all to take a ride with me. Both of you. Come see Freetown. It’s finally starting to look like something out there, and I’m tired of just telling you about it.” He looked at me when he said the last part. “I want you to see it.”
Rita was already reaching for her cane. “Well, why you standing there? Go get my good shoes, the tan ones. I’m not riding through my Alexander’s dream looking like I don’t have sense.”
So he loaded us into the Maybach and drove us out to Freetown.
I’d heard him talk about it for weeks. I still wasn’t ready for the size of it.
It opened up on both sides of a brand-new road that didn’t exist on any map yet, acre after acre of red Maryland dirt turned into something with a heartbeat.
Frames of what would eventually be houses marched in neat rows down streets that already had names on temporary signs.
Reserve Way. Alexander Lane. Banks Blvd.
Streets named for the family and the dream.
Not little houses either. Big, generous, wide-porched homes with two-car garages and yards meant for children.
Farther in, a community center was going up with roman columns already standing white against the sky, a building that said you belong to something before you ever walked through the door.
There was a rec center taking shape beside it, the concrete shell of what Justice said would be an Olympic pool.
A market. A health clinic framed and waiting.
Men in hard hats everywhere, dozens of them, laying brick, running wire, building it with their own hands.
Cranes turned slow against a clear blue sky.
Somewhere a radio played oldies, and a man up on a scaffold sang along to it, and the place buzzed with the particular joy of people building something they actually believed in.
Signs staked into the dirt showed renderings of what it would all become.
Tree-lined streets in full green leaf. A splash fountain in a town square with brown babies running through it.
Grandmothers rocking on wide porches, couples walking dogs down sidewalks that hadn’t been poured yet.
And running through the heart of it, drawn up in loving detail, an old-style colonial main street.
Brick storefronts with tall windows and striped awnings, gold letters painted on the glass, a walkable stretch of Black-owned shops and cafés and bakeries with lines drawn out the doors and around the block.
A Black Georgetown, cut from nothing but red dirt and one family’s nerve.
It was all still renderings and framing and promise for now, not a soul living in it yet, but you could stand there in the dust and see it breathing.
“Justice,” I breathed, my face all but pressed to the glass. “You’re building an entire world out here.”
“That’s the idea.” There was a pride in his voice he didn’t let out often. In the back seat Rita was going on about how her Alexander would’ve wept to see it, how this was the dream the family bled for, and Justice was soaking up every word of it.
I was smiling so hard my face hurt. For one blessed stretch of road I forgot every lie I was living. I was just a woman riding shotgun next to a good man who was building something beautiful, proud of him, happy for him, letting myself pretend the pretend was real.
Then we rounded the bend past the framed-up rec center, and I saw the sign.
Big. Blue and white. Staked at the mouth of the biggest job site on the whole development, right where the heavy equipment was tearing into the earth.
HARLOW CONSTRUCTION.
And underneath, smaller, a phone number and a slogan I had seen ten thousand times. On letterheads. On a truck in my own driveway. On the breast pocket of the man who used to come home and take my life apart with his hands.
The world tipped sideways.
I was not in that car anymore.
I was in a kitchen in Buckhead with my back against the refrigerator and Roman’s hand around my jaw, squeezing, my feet barely touching the floor.
I could smell his cologne. I could hear the low, calm, reasonable voice he always used when he did it, because he never once yelled.
He stayed gentle-voiced the entire time he was breaking me, and that was the thing that would have confused anyone.
“You made me do this. Look what you made me do.”
The back of his hand across my mouth. The taste of copper.
The counter’s edge catching me in the ribs when I folded.
Him stepping back to fix his cuffs in the hall mirror like he’d done nothing more strenuous than move a chair, while I stayed down on the tile counting my own breaths, learning the exact arithmetic of when it was safe to get up.
I remembered the concealer. That’s what came back sharpest. Standing at my bathroom mirror before work with the good concealer, the full-coverage kind, painting it over the bruise blooming along my cheekbone.
Layering it. Setting it. Checking it in three different lights so nobody at the firm would see what my husband did.
A grown woman with a law degree, hiding her own face to go argue other people’s cases.
And I remembered the night I finally ran.
The one that was bad enough that there wasn’t a version of staying left in me.
The night I understood, down in my bones, that if I did not get out of that house I was going to die in it.
And that he would fix his cuffs in the mirror afterward, then look them in the eye and mean every word when he told them how much he loved me.
That was the man whose name was staked into Justice Banks’s dream in blue and white.
“Skye.”
Justice’s voice reached me from very far away.
“Skye. You alright?”
I came back into my body. The car. The sunlight. Rita humming in the back. Justice half-turned in the driver’s seat, watching me with a little crease between his brows, because I’d gone somewhere and he’d felt it happen.
“I’m fine.” My voice came out almost level.
I don’t know how. Five years of practice, I suppose.
“Sorry. I just, I got overwhelmed for a second.” I made myself smile.
Made myself look right at him. Pointed my chin at all that steel and dust like it was the view that had knocked the wind out of me, not the sign.
“Look at all this. Justice, I’m so proud of you. I mean that. Look what you built.”
Whatever he’d seen on my face, he let it go, because I’d handed him something true to explain it. The moment passed over us and moved on.
He turned back to the wheel and eased us on down the road, pointing out where the school would go, the health clinic, the little market. Rita clapped her hands. And I sat there in that beautiful car, in that beautiful lie, with my body still shaking under my skin where nobody could see it.
I waited until Justice was deep in telling Rita about the school site, the two of them lit up in the front while I sat back with my phone low in my lap where nobody could see it.
My hands were not steady. I typed it fast, before the fear could talk me back out of it.
I can’t do this later. I can’t wait. He’s here, Duke. Roman’s not just in town, he’s IN it. He’s building the development with Justice. I need to move soon.
The three dots came up almost right away. Duke never was far from his phone when it came to me.
Slow down, cuz. Breathe. Don’t do nothing crazy tonight.
Then, a second later:
We’ll figure it out before he finds out where you are.
I looked up from the phone, out the windshield at all that dust and promise sliding by, then over at the side of Justice’s face while he talked, animated, happy, closer to peace than I’d ever seen him. The man I had no right to. The life I could not keep and did not want to leave.
I put the phone back in my lap and typed one word.
Okay. Act fast.