I didn’t ask for details. I could smell it on him. I could see it in the way he held me, like a man who’d just done something permanent and needed to feel something gentle to balance it out. Whatever happened tonight was done. He was here and he was alive. That’s all that mattered to me.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“Okay.” I pulled back and looked up at him. “Let’s go be with our baby.”
48
Serenity
Xander and I were at the kitchen table going through the evidence binder for the third time this week. The indictment hearing was next Monday and he wanted every piece of our defense airtight. The metadata from Vivica’s computer, Dante’s testimony outline, the financial records linking Vivica to the original cover-up. He walked me through each document, explaining how he planned to present it to the grand jury, and I followed along asking questions when something didn’t make sense.
We worked well together. I’d noticed that over the last few weeks but tonight it felt different, more fluid. He’d start a sentence about the prosecution’s angle and I’d finish it because I already knew where he was going. He’d look up from a document to explain something and realize I’d already read ahead. At one point he smiled at me across the table and said “you sure you don’t want to go to law school?” and I laughed because it was the first time in a while that somebody saw potential in me that didn’t involve trauma.
His phone rang around seven. He glanced at the screen, held up a finger, and answered.
“Hey.” Pause. “What?” Longer pause. His jaw tightened and he closed his eyes for a beat too long. “Where are you right now?” Another pause. “Don’t say anything to anyone. I’m on my way.”
He hung up and sat there for a second, staring at his phone like it had personally offended him. Then he rubbed his temples with both hands and exhaled slowly through his nose.
“Everything okay?” I asked even though the answer was clearly no.
“Elise got arrested. DUI. She ran a red light in Georgetown and blew twice the legal limit.” He said it flat, like he was embarrassed to even be saying the words out loud. “I gotta go deal with this.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.” He started packing up his briefcase but his movements were off. He was shoving folders in instead of placing them, his whole energy shifting from the warm focus he’d been giving me all evening into something tight and exhausted. I watched him go from my lawyer to somebody’s tired boyfriend in about ten seconds.
“We can pick up where we left off tomorrow,” I said. “You’ve got this handled. The case is strong.”
“I know. I just…” He stopped at the door and looked back at me. Something passed across his face that I couldn’t fully read. Frustration, maybe. Or the look of a man leaving somewhere he wanted to be to go deal with somebody else’s mess. “I’ll call you in the morning. Get some rest.”
“You too.”
He left and the apartment got real quiet real fast. I sat at the table surrounded by legal documents and empty coffee cups, trying not to think about whatever that almost was between us before his phone rang. I had no business naming it. That man had a whole girlfriend even if she was currently sitting in a policestation. My focus was the hearing on Monday, the baby sleeping in the next room, and staying out of prison.
But I noticed how quiet the apartment felt after he left. I noticed that.
• • •
Sarai was down for the night, well until she woke up for her next feeding, and I was on the couch watching something I wasn’t paying attention to when I heard Rita moving around in the guest room, opening cabinets and closing drawers, shuffling around on the hardwood. They were normal sounds. Rita was always puttering around before bed, organizing things for the next day. It was just her way of winding down.
Then she walked into the living room fully dressed with her shoes on and her purse over her shoulder.
I looked up from the couch. “Where are you going, Grandma? It’s after eight.”
“Everly, I gotta get down to the club. Rosalee is always off with the count and if I don’t check her tonight she’ll have us short again by the weekend. I’m not about to let that girl skim off my money because she thinks I’m too distracted to notice.” She was digging through her purse while she talked, moving with a purpose that said she had somewhere to be and I was holding her up. “Have you seen my snub nose? I left it on the dresser but it’s not there.”
I sat up slowly. My heart started beating in a way that didn’t match the calm on my face.
“Your what? And grandma, who is Everly?”
“The snub nose! My revolver! What do you mean who is Everly? Girl, quit playing. I need to get out of here before the first crowd shows up. You know Friday nights are our biggest take. And I need that gun because Curtis has been letting thoseyoung boys run numbers out the back without clearing it with me and Alex first. I told him if it happens again somebody’s getting popped.”
She said it all with perfect conviction. Her voice was clear, her eyes were sharp, her posture was straight. She looked exactly like the Rita I’d known my entire life. Commanding, certain, moving through the world like it owed her a favor. But everything she was saying belonged to a decade that ended well before I was born.
“Grandma.” I stood up and walked toward her slowly, carefully. “It’s Serenity. Not Everly. I’m Serenity, your granddaughter.”
